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I AM JESUS' LITTLE LAMB, TOO 

'If you should find a little lamb "Christ's little lambs are not all safe. 

Out in the dark and cold, They' re wandering everywhere ; 

You'd want to take it home, I know, If we love Him as Peter did, 

And put it in its fold. Then aren't they in our care? 

'And you would give it food to eat, • "So let us lead them back to Him, 
And make it snug and warm; Our Shepherd, strong and good; 

You'd put it in the shepherd's care, His fold is large enough for all, 
Lest it should come to harm. And He will give them food." 

— Selected. 



LAMP- LIGHTERS 

ACROSS THE 

SEA 

A STORY STUDY BOOK FOR JUNIORS 

MARGARET APPLEGARTH 

Author of Jack of All Trades; The School 
at Mother's Knee 



Published by 

THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ON THE UNITED 

STUDY OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 

WEST MEDFORD, MASS. 



An 



Copyright 1920 

The Central Committee 

on the United Study of 

Foreign Missions 



DEC 1 1 1920 

VCTMONT PRINTING COMPANY, BRATTLf SOBO 

©CLA601922 



$ 

en 



FOREWORD 

MISS APPLEGARTH has given us a much 
needed book. She tells the marvelous 
story of the Bible in a way that will attract boys 
and girls of all ages. We recommend it for junior 
societies ami mission bands and for Sunday 
school libraries and classes. It has a legitimate 
place in every Bible school. Ask your junior and 
intermediate teachers to try it for six weeks. 

Central Committee on the United Study 
of Foreign Missions 




r~-»*V- 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 
Introduction — "The Big Little Library" 6 
Chapter 
I. — "Handing Down the Big Little Li- 
brary" 11 

II. — "The Book the Shoe-Cobbler Made" 25 

III. — "Growing Behind Darkened Win- 
dows" 42 

IV. — "The Book Fished Out of the Wa- 
ter" 55 

V. — "Answering the Giant Question 

Mark" 69 

VI. — "Speaking Their Language" 83 



TO MY FATHER 

A "Lamp-Lighter" whose keen and 
vivid interpretation of the Bible 
has always been like an illumi- 
nating translation of God's Word 
to his devoted daughter. 





THE 
BIG -LITTLE 
LIBRARY JR £3^? 



This is the Thing-at-the-Front-that-you-Skip, 
only of course, I hope you will be curious enough to 
read it and find out why Peter and Polly got their 
pictures drawn staggering along under such a load 
of books ! 

It all came about like this: once when they were 
downtown they met the Lady-Who-Wrote-Things 
in front of a bookstore, and she asked them if they 
would be kind enough to carry home some books for 
her, as they were neighbors. Peter politely said that 
of course they would, while Polly sensibly asked how 
many there were, please! 

Whereupon the Lady-Who-Wrote-Things smiled 
the queerest smile as she answered: "Let me see — 
there ought to be sixty-six." 

"Sixty-six?" Peter whistled, while his face grew a 
mile long. For it's all very well to feel obliging to a 
nice neighbor, but perfectly impossible to carry home 
all downtown for her. 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 7 

Polly promptly suggested letting the bookstore 
wagon deliver them, but the Lady-Who- Wrote 
Things said she hated to trouble them with such a 
small (?) order, which Peter and Polly could easily 
carry, turn and turn about. 

At that, Peter, who was quick at arithmetic, 
divided sixty-six by two, and said it made thirty- 
three books apiece, and he honestly didn't believe he 
could ever do it! Not without dropping a book or 
two in the mud, you know. Or losing some. For 
they would surely reach from here on his coat, way up 
beyond his chin and his nose and his hair, way up 
into the air like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or a 
steeplechase at the circus. As for his poor sister 
Polly, he hardly thought she ought to try it. For 
once she had had the mumps, you know, and when 
she was only a baby she — 

But the Lady-Who- Wrote-Things whisked into 
the store before he got Polly decently excused. So 
he glared at Polly. And Polly glared at him. This 
horrible neighbor ! 

"Let's run!" Peter hissed between his teeth, 
starting off. 

"Can't! She's back already," Polly groaned. 

Then the Lady-Who-Wrote-Things handed Peter 
a very small package. "There!" she said, "and 
thank you very much." 

He held it, of course. But he waited. And 
Polly waited. 

"What are you waiting for?" the Lady asked. 

"For the other sixty-five books," Peter replied, 
a little bored to find another lady as poor at arithme- 
tic as Polly. 



8 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

How her eyes did twinkle as she leaned over to 
whisper: "But you're carrying the sixty-six books 
this very minute!" 

"Ami?" gasped Peter. 

"Is he?" gasped Polly. 

And they fastened their eyes on the astonishing 
package in perfect surprise. 

"They must be awfully small books," Polly said 
curiously. 

"It's not books at all, it's book," Peter announced 
after a thorough punching all over the package, 
"there's no library about this, honest injun! Why, 
I thought you were going to load us down with 
something almost a mile high — " 

"And heavy," sighed Polly. 

"And that they'd topple all over us — " 

"What are they about, anyhow?" Polly asked, 
poking it here and there. 

Stories," answered the Lady-W T ho-Wrote-Things, 
stories of adventure mostly, about gardens and 
deserts and camels and famous travelers and palaces 
and shepherd boys who became kings, and giants, 
and fishermen who followed a carpenter's Son, and 
shipwrecks. Why, my dears, it's the biggest kind 
of library, those sixty-six books!" 

"Squeezed into this?" Peter gulped, unbelieving. 

"Oh, as for that," laughed the Lady, "it's not only 
a Library, it's also a Lamp, and a Sword, and Bread, 
and more Precious than Jewels; and it's built all the 
hospitals and orphanages and old people's homes; 
and it's done more to rule the world than kings or 
guns or warships or submarines — " 

"My goodness!" gasped Polly, her eyes like sau- 



ce 
tt 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 9 

cers, as if she thought the magic package might 
blow up any minute. 

But Peter had an inspiration: "I've guessed!" he 
shouted, "so won't you give me a look at it, just to 
make sure I'm right?" 

"That's what I hoped you'd ask," nodded the 
Lady-Who-Wrote-Things, "for I know a wonderful 
game called 'Librarian 9 which we three could play—" 

"Oh, what fun!" (Chorus.) 

"Handing out books to people who call — " 

More chorus: "Hurrah! Let's race home and 
begin now, can't we?" 

Which is the way they joined the long line of Libra- 
rians and Book-Sellers and Lamp-Lighters who are 
still playing God's wonderful game "Handing 
Down the Big Little Library." And in case you 
haven't guessed what this Library really is, you will 
find the very stories told to Peter and Polly written 
down here especially for you. 



CHAPTER I. 

"Handing Down the Big Little Library" 

"And how hear we, every man in our 
own language wherein we were born? 
.... speaking in our tongues the wonder- 
ful works of God?" (acts ii, 8) 



CHAPTER I. 



"Handing Down the Big Little Library" 

NCE upon a time there were two 
little boys who were full of 
questions — the way boys some- 
times are, even today! In the 
cool of the evening, when their 
father was through working on 
the very first farm that ever 
was made, they used to sit at 
their tent door and get him to 
tell the most fascinating stories 
about the wonderful garden he 
used to live in before he started 
his farm. And about how he 
used to be the only person in the world, until mother 
was made to keep him company. 

"Tell us about how the Lord God let you name all 
the animals and things," Cain used to say; and Abel 
would pipe up: "And all about that serpent mother 
hates!" 

And so Adam would sit at his tent door and tell 
story after story about the Beginning of Everything ; 
and, when Eve had rocked the little girl-babies to 
sleep, she would sit there, too, telling the things that 
she remembered. 

It was only natural that when Cain and Abel 
married, they should tell their children the very same 
stories in the cool of other evenings, and, I expect, 
the children used to stare up at that funny man in 




12 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

the moon and ask what grandfather Adam had named 
him! Later, when they themselves grew up, their 
babies loved to hear these same old stories; and, of 
course, when Noah's family spent forty days and forty 
nights floating around in their ark, Noah must have 
had lots of spare time to tell endless stories to the 
wee grandchildren who had nothing else to do but 
listen all day ! There were new tales by this time, of 
course, about Enoch who walked right home with 
God one day, and about nice, old Methusaleh who 
lived to be older than anybody else. And I suppose 
the little sons of Shem, Ham, and Japheth used to 
scamper off to peek through the bars at the animals 
just as you do at the zoo, and wonder why great- 
great-grandfather Adam ever named lions, lions, or 
elephants, elephants ! 

By and by, after Abraham journeyed across many 
deserts, camel-back, you may be sure that his nephew 
Lot and his little son Isaac liked to hear all about it, 
and about how God had promised him as many 
children as there were stars up in the sky. Can't 
you see Isaac squinting up, trying hard to count, 
beginning with the seven shiny stars of the Dipper 
then on and on until his sleepy eyes blinked shut, 
and Sarah wisely put him to bed? 

Every new grandfather had new stories to add to 
the old ones, and the girls all thought that the love 
affairs of Isaac and Jacob were thrilling, while the 
boys grew excited over Joseph, whose brothers wick- 
edly sold him as a slave to some foreigners, who took 
him to Egypt, where he became ever so important, 
— a sort of Mr. Hoover for King Pharaoh, regulating 
the food supply in time of famine. 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 13 

But the Baby-in-the-Bulrushes was to do better 
than tell stories! For the princess who rescued him 
from the water never knew that she was hiring his 
own mother to nurse him, and whisper stories to him 
about the past glories of his own people back in the 
Promised Land. Being a prince, he learned the queer 
Egyptian figure writing called hieroglyphics, and God 
put it into his heart to write down all the things his 
mother had so often told him. Although Moses 
never dreamed about handing his written stories 
down to you and me, yet God knew all about us even 
then, of course, and had you and me in mind 
while Moses was scratching his queer-looking hiero- 
glyphics on crackly papyrus leaves. So Moses was 
Lamp-Lighter Number I to pass on the first ^ve 
books of our Big Little Library to us. Probably you 
already know the names of his books: Genesis, Exo- 
dus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers. Other 
Lamp-Lighters followed — like Samuel, David, and 
Solomon; but it was Ezra, the scribe, who was a sort 
of editor, arranging them for us into the thirty-nine 
books of the Old Testament. 

For several thousand years these thirty-nine 
books seemed quite enough, and on Sabbath days 
they were read in the synagogue from the big papy- 
rus scrolls. You will remember that Jesus Himself 
read them there. And when He was the carpenter's 
little son, down in Nazareth, I know that His dear 
mother Mary used to tell Him story after story about 
his ancestors, — Ruth and King David and Solomon. 

By and by, after the Lord Jesus had gone back to 
heaven, one of His friends named Mark was away in 
a strange land telling people about Jesus, when God 



14 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 



put it into Mark's heart to write down all the things 
that he and Peter remembered about Jesus. He was 
a very brisk story- writer, with a nice jerky way of 
saying "Straightway Jesus did this or that," or 
"Immediately He did thus and so" — until nobody 
could escape seeing how the Lord Jesus was busy 
every minute of His wonderful life ! 

Other friends wrote down things that they had seen 
Him do and heard Him say, and they not only wrote 
these dear stories, they also wrote letters of advice 
and explanation to the little new churches they had 
started away off in foreign lands. Their story books 
are called Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, and 
Revelation, while their letters form the rest of the 
New Testament part of our Big Little Library. 

All of which shows you how those first Lamp- 
Lighters wrote our Library for us : sixty-six books in 
one book, but none of them in any language that you 
or I speak, for they were written in Hebrew or Ara- 
maic or Greek. 

UT the world is big, and a few 
sets of papyrus scrolls would 
not have been nearly enough to 
go around. So the busy Brown 
Monks copied and copied and 
copied! It was dreadfully stu- 
pid work, for they printed each 
letter, and ran all the letters 
together instead of separating 
them into words. And I am 
afraid that sometimes, on sum- 
mer afternoons, when the bum- 
ble bees were droning lazily in 




Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 15 

the clover just outside the monastery windows, and 
when gentle little breezes drowsily tickled their eye- 
lids, that many a monk, like Winken and Blinken 
and Nod, sailed off in a silver dream boat! After 
nice little naps they would wake up with a jerk 
and a guilty look over their shoulders and start 
copying again, pell mell! But when the sentences 
looked like this: — 

ETRESPONDENSJESUSDIXITEIS 
PROFECTIANNUNCIATEJOANNI 

it is only natural they should skip several lines by 
mistake, isn't it? And from that time to this, wise 
translators have been worrying their poor heads over 
these blunders, wondering what is right and what is 
wrong ! 

In that day many of those Brown Monks in Italy 
had souls so full of love for the Lord Jesus that they 
wanted to make His Book a thing of beauty, and not 
long ago when I was in Italy I loved to look at their 
old yellow parchment Bibles, with the funny Latin 
words all run together and quaint little pictures 
tucked in here and there along the margins, softly 
painted, to form frames for the first letters of new 
paragraphs, just as has been done in this chapter. And 
down in my heart I said "Thank you!" to the Brown 
Monks of Long Ago for being such cheerful Lamp- 
Lighters, working away day after day to hand down 
the Big Little Library to me — and to you, too, of 
course, only I didn't know you then! 

Then their parchment Bibles began going on trips, 
carried by those same Brown Monks. Dangerous 
trips, up north of Italy, to Savage-People-who-did- 



16 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

not- want-Monks. You will hardly believe that it 
was your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather 
to whom they went, and mine too! Wild yellow- 
haired savages they were in those days, brandishing 
spears and axes, dressed in the skins of wild animals, 
living in caves or in forests, killing one another, and 
drinking wine from the skulls of their enemies. It 
hardly seems possible that anybody in my nice quiet 
family was like that only fifteen hundred years ago — 
or in your family, either, does it? 

France was called Gaul in those far-away days; and 
some years after Caesar's famous Gallic wars with 
the savages there, the Brown Monks sallied up into 
Gaul, armed only with Bibles, while other Brown 
Monks ventured among the equally savage Goths 
who lived in Germany, and still others sailed across 
the choppy North Sea to the tawny-haired Britons 
who lived in England. It was a big job for those 
quiet, patient monks, and there are certain names we 
can only hear with the greatest admiration — like 
Augustine, the monk who went to England, and 
Patrick, who went to Ireland, and Columba, who 
settled in Scotland. For they built monasteries and 
taught those tawny-haired ancestors of ours how to 
spell and read the queer Latin words in the parch- 
ment Bibles. And the first thing the monks knew, 
all over England (and over in France and Germany, 
too) the fierce savages began calming down; they 
built themselves decent homes such as the monks 
taught them to build, and they wore modest clothes 
such as the monks taught them to weave, and they 
were so much happier that they trained up some 
monks of their own who could go and convert other 




The plump little fellow in the quilted jacket is brimful of the adven- 
tures of his own grandfather. You can almost hear him confiding in the 
Chinese camera-man that grandfather is an evangelist who goes off to 
far-away towns to tell heathen people about Jesus. He packs a wheel- 
barrow full of Bibles and trundles them uphill and downhill for weeks 
at a time. 

"There just wouldn't be Bibles in lots of places if it weren't for him!" 
the little grandson insists proudly. 

Even the swaddled baby looks full of pride about it; while Twin Sister 
squints at us a little severely: "If you don't believe it, ask mother!" 
she seems to say. 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 17 

savage tribes to worship the true God, — which is the 
way England got to be England, and France got to 
be France. 

And yet, if those brown-robed monks had traveled 
eastward to Greece and India and China, instead of 
westward to France and England then you and I 
would still be pagans — unless "they" sent Lamp- 
Lighters to us faster than we send them to them! 

All this time the Bible was still in Greek or Hebrew 
or Latin, which only scholars could understand, and, 
I suppose, nice Mr. and Mrs. Cloth- Weaver and Mr. 
and Mrs. Market-Man sat wondering what the good 
Book really said, when the priest mumbled those un- 
known words ! The very little Weavers and the Baby 
Market-Men blinked and yawned their poor little 
heads nearly off! You would have, too. 

But over in England people began trying to trans- 
late the Bible. Earliest of all was a Saxon cow- 
herd named Caedmon, to whom an abbess named 
Hilda used to chant a translation of the Latin Scrip- 
tures, so that he could sing them to the common 
people, like a chanted story. Next came a scholar 
named Bede, who died the very day he finished trans- 
lating John's Gospel; and a little later the famous 
King Alfred became a Lamp-Lighter, but you will 
smile to see the kind of English our great-great- 
great-grandfathers spoke in those days: "uren 
Fader dhic art in heofnas" ("Our Father who art 
in heaven"!). 

Then for several hundred years only the Latin 
Bible was read in England in church, and half of the 
people grew up never knowing what it was all 
about. But John Wyclif had the same idea for 



18 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

England that Martin Luther had for Germany, and 
so he finally translated the entire Bible into the 
"modir tonge"; England was such a wicked land just 
then, however, that our ancestors tried to put Wy- 
clif to death, for they really did not want to read for 
themselves how God asked them to live. 

One hundred years later the next true English 
Lamp-Lighter was William Tyndale; by this time 
John Gutenberg's printing press was ready to print 
his Bible, but poor Mr. Tyndale was so unpopular 
with the wicked priests and the King that in 1536 
they actually burned him to death at the stake, where 
he kept praying over and over: "God open the King 
of England's eyes." 

God answered that prayer, for three years later 
there was one of his Bibles in every pulpit. We 
got our English Bible because there were Lamp- 
Lighters willing to suffer persecution, imprisonment 
and death. As one of Wyclif 's friends said in the 
quaint English of that age: "God grant to us all 
grace to ken well and to kepe well Holie Writ, and to 
suffer joiefulli some paine for it at the last." 

Over in Germany a wise monk, named Martin 
Luther, had the same idea: why not give his people 
the Bible in their own language? Why, of course! 
So he translated the Bible, and found it hard work, 
as one of his famous remarks shows: "Great God, 
how painful and laborious it is to compel the Hebrew 
writers to speak German!" Yet when the people 
who wove cloth and the merchants in the markets 
read for themselves how the Lord Jesus wanted them 
to live, it made life so much clearer to them all. 
Martin Luther had other new ideas about Christiani- 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 



19 



ty, too, and so he stopped being a monk then and 
there, — which was really the beginning of all our 
Protestant churches ' 

One wonderful thing about looking back into our 
yesterdays, is to see that history is really His-story : 
for when God put it into the heart of Martin Luther 
to translate the Bible into everyday talk, somebody 
else in Germany, named John Gutenberg, had invent- 
ed a printing press, so that it was no longer necessary 
for busy monks to copy each letter, but clanking 
presses clashed and banged, and busy little "print- 
er's-devils" dashed madly around with sheets of 
wet paper covered with the inky words of the Ger- 
man Bible, the very first book ever printed with 
movable type. God gets things ready in time, and 
He uses people's inventions in one country to spread 
His gospel way around the world to other countries. 
Yet I suppose none of those cross little printer's- 
devils ever dreamed that they were Lamp-Lighters! 
They probably dreamed of supper and of a game of 
ball out on the green afterwards. But God knew! 

IMAGINE how strange it would 
be to see a big, thick Bible 
chained to the pulpit desk in 
your church! Yet that is what 
they often did in those days 
several hundred years ago, when 
Bibles were scarce and expen- 
sive, and only the wealthy could 
own them. 

But all on account of Mary 
Jones a new day was coming. 
Yet Mary Jones never dreamed 




20 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

about being a Lamp-Lighter, for she was just a little 
girl, your age, who wanted Something very badly! 

She lived over in Wales where there are lots of 
mountains sitting around all over the landscape, and 
every time Mary went to see this Something, she had 
to trudge uphill and downhill for two miles to get 
to It. There It lay on her aunt's table, and she would 
open It to read the nicest stories about The Little Girl- 
Who-Died-but-was-Made-Alive-Again (her father's 
name was Jairus, you know), or about that Wonder- 
ful-Picnic-Lunch-Basket, which a certain mother 
had packed for her little boy, never dreaming that 
the two small fishes and the seven flat loaves were 
going to feed ^ve thousand hungry people! Mary 
Jones loved those stories enough to tramp over the 
hills four miles every week, until one day she said to 
herself (in Welsh, of course) "Why not earn some 
money and buy a Bible all my own? I will!" 

She was ten years old then, so she saved and 
saved and saved for s-i-x long years before she 
thought she had enough money. Then the big 
question was — where, oh, where, could one buy a 
Bible, for they were so scarce? 

But one day she heard about a minister away over 
at Bala who had Welsh Bibles for sale. To be sure, 
Bala was twenty-five miles away and ever so many 
craggy Welsh mountains sat right in the way. But 
Mary clutched her precious money in her hand and 
vigorously trudged "over the hills and far away" to 
Bala town! She reached there late at night, and oh 
dear! oh dear! Mr. Minister's house was shut up, 
and dark ! Yet I never heard that she cried even two 
salt tears; she simply walked around until she found 




Can't you fairly hear the little Chinese wishes clicking inside these 
cunning Chinese heads? For you can see for yourself how they love 
that doll, — although the Littlest Scholar looks away as if she were all 
discouraged about it! Perhaps she is thinking that if Miss Honorable 
Teacher gives the doll to anybody it certainly will not be to such a tiny 
unimportant beginner as herself, who can't even read or count yet! 

Just suppose we could send a box of our very own to China, with enough 
dolls to go around so that every single child could have one, even Little 
Dismal Discouragement! Oh wouldn't they all turn right-about-face 
and bow, and bow, and bow, the politest Chinese bows? 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 21 

another house, still wide-awake with twinkling lights 
where the astonished family put her to bed for the 
night. 

The next morning they took her over to the 
minister's, and she told her quaint little story of 
saving money for six long years and tramping twenty- 
five miles, and now she would like a Bible, please. 
Then what do you suppose that minister said, — 
that every single Bible was sold! 

And then poor Mary Jones did cry! More than 
two salt tears, too. She wailed as if her dear, little 
Welsh heart would surely break, until Mr. Charles 
(the minister) could not stand seeing her grief another 
minute, and so he gave her his own Bible. Mary did 
April Showers then, with a rainbow attachment, and 
with many a happy "Thank you, kind sir" she 
trotted back home over those twenty-five miles with 
her Treasure under her arm. 

But you must not suppose that she walks out of 
this story-book yet; for Mr. Charles went to London 
and told everybody about that plucky little Welsh 
lassie who considered a Bible worth miles of walking 
and years of saving. He begged the London people 
to form a society to supply more Welsh Bibles. 

Then up jumped a Man-with-an-Idea: "1/ for 
Wales, why not for the whole World?' 9 he shouted, and 
everybody cheered and chereed ! 

Soon afterwards, the great British and Foreign 
Bible Society was formed in England; then by and 
by the American Bible Society was formed here 
in our country; and other societies in France and 
Germany, too — all because little Welsh Mary had 
loved the Bible and wanted one so badly. 



%<& Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

But Mary's story does not end even here: I don't 
suppose that it can ever end, for at this very minute 
giant printing-presses are printing thousands of new 
Bibles in all kinds of languages known in the world, 
and thousands of men are making these Bibles loop 
the world, — men on camels stalking across hot 
deserts, with Arabian Bibles stuffed in their saddle- 
bags; men on elephants plodding through steaming 
jungles, with Hindu Bibles in burlap sacks; men in 
bullock carts jouncing from village to village, with 
Burman Bibles in wooden crates; men pushing 
squeaky wheelbarrows uphill and down, peddling 
Chinese Bibles; men rolling along under bamboo trees 
in jinrikishas, peddling Japanese Bibles; men paddling 
among crocodiles in tree-trunk canoes, peddling 
African Bibles; men on dog-sleds scooting over snow 
prairies, peddling Eskimo Bibles; men in automobiles 
whizzing all over our own country, peddling Ameri- 
can Bibles — all on account of little Mary Jones ! 

The Bible Societies are printing Bibles today in 
about seven hundred different languages and dialects, 
making the Bible speak everybody's language, just 
the way Wyclif and Tyndale, years ago, made it 
speak our language. It is the World's Best Seller, 
too, because people's hearts are hungry for the good 
news it contains. 

Have you ever held a big sea-shell to your ear and 
listened to it hum and murmur, as if it were telling 
you about its longings to be back home in old ocean? 
If I were only a fairy I would turn you into little Mr. 
and Miss Atlases and let you hold the world on your 
shoulders, so that I could hold country by country 
against your ear and let you hear it murmur its great 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 23 

longing, as if it knew it would always be restless until 
it rested in God. "But where, oh where, is the real 
God?" each country murmurs. 

All on account of Lamp-Lighters this hunger for 
God is being satisfied. And if you ask me why we call 
them Lamp-Lighters, let me remind you that just 
as Bible stories have guided our own feet into Chris- 
tian paths, so they will guide the weary wandering 
feet of all the little yellow children and the brown, 
black, and red children in God's family back to Him, 
for 

"Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a 
light unto my path." (psalm cxrx,105) 




CHAPTER II. 

The Book the Shoe-Cobbler Made" 

"The law of thy mouth is better unto me 
than thousands of gold and silver." 
(psalm cxix, 72) 



CHAPTER II. 



"The Book the Shoe-Cobbler Made" 

Once upon a time there was a Cobbler. All day 
long he cobbled shoes for a living : scrootch-scrootchi- 
scrootch, you could have heard him cutting out the 
leather, or tap-tap-i-tap, he was hammering nails for 
dear life ! But he was never bored at doing such stu- 
pid jobs, because while he patiently hammered away 
his mind was busy taking long trips to distant lands 
— a most unusual Cobbler, as you plainly can see. 

On the wall opposite his bench he had a curious 
map, made out of bits of brown paper pasted together 
in the shape of the world, so big that it covered the 
whole side of the wall. Here and there all over it 
he kept pasting clippings which told about the differ- 
ent countries, and sometimes he tucked in little sen- 
tences of his own, or drew little drawings. 

He seemed to know all about Everywhere ! Even 
years before, when he was only ten, his playmates 
nicknamed him "Columbus," and they used to 
scramble up into the branches of a dwarf witch-elm 
tree, like so many big hungry birds, to hear this new 
little Christopher tell the most blood-curdling stories 
about the queer, far-off lands on the other side of the 
world, where savage people lived whose faces were 
yellow or black or brown. A wonderful old sailor 
named Captain Cook, had just come home from these 
out-of-the-way places, and you may be sure those 
boys up in the elm tree listened with all their ears, as 
"Columbus" told just how the dreadful cannibals 



26 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

ate one another up, and how the yellow people drown- 
ed girl babies. 

When "Columbus" grew up into a Cobbler, it was 
no wonder that he could make such a perfect map or 
take such lengthy trips, while he hammered nails 
into shoe-soles, — trips to those wretched places where 
everything was all wrong, where little children were 
so unsafe, and where grown-ups worshipped carved 
dolls of wood and stone and called them "gods." 

Beside him on his bench was his Bible, always 
open, and, while he sat cobbling, two words seemed 
to keep staring him in the face: — "Go ye!" "Go 
ye!" they called at him day after day! 

Finally he could stand it no longer, and so our quiet 
Cobbler went to a big meeting, and, standing right 
up, suggested to everybody that just as Jesus Christ 
had sent His apostles into far-off places, so Christian 
ministers ought still to obey that command, "Go ye 
into all the world — and teach the nations," and to 
keep on going until everyone everywhere had accept- 
ed the glad tidings. 

Dear me! You should have seen the chairman of 
the meeting, a nice old gentleman, good as gold, but 
so angry at the Cobbler that he shouted at him: 
"Sit down, young man ! When God wants to convert 
the heathen, He will do it without your help or mine !" 

Other ministers pounced on the Cobbler, too: 
didn't he know that he couldn't speak the strange 
languages of those fierce savages? Didn't he realize 
how very far away from England such people lived? 
And that they would probably kill him? And that 
God surely would have made it very clear if He 
wanted English ministers to run such risks; — surely 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 27 

He could have sent a second Pentecost with the 
"gift of tongues," so that Englishmen could talk any 
language without the least bit of trouble ! 

The Cobbler went home. But those two little 
words "Go ye!" kept on twinkling up at him from 
his open Bible, and the Christ-less unhappy places on 
his map kept beckoning to him, too; then he wrote 
some wonderful newspaper articles, proving what 
each faraway land needed, proving also that English- 
men could learn strange languages, if they cared to! 
One day, at another meeting, he preached a remark- 
able sermon on: "Expect great things from God! 
Attempt great things for God!" — in fact, it was such 
a stirring sermon that four months later those very 
same ministers sent the Cobbler to India. They had 
organized a new society and raised enough money 
to pay his expenses. 

This was in 1793. India was a very hard place to 
reach in those days : It took five long, weary months 
of rolling and tossing in a most uncomfortable ship. 
Even when he landed, nobody seemed to want him, 
— for the East India Company decided that mission- 
aries would probably be a great nuisance to have 
around, so they were most unpleasant to him! As 
for the millions of brown people, I imagine they 
were a wee bit doubtful about this very white man 
who insisted on being interested in them. 

But Mr. William Carey, Shoe-Cobbler, had come 
all that long distance from England on purpose to 
be interested in brown people and he watched them 
by the hour. You would have, too! Everything 
was so different — and so wrong. 

He found that India is a land full of hot little 



28 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

villages, shaded by palm trees and mango trees, with 
row upon row of thatched mud huts which look for 
all the world like hay stacks! He found that little 
brown babies with nothing on rolled around in the 
dusty roads, making mud-less mud pies, because the 
piping hot sun had dried up the mud, and parched all 
the ground until grass and vegetables shriveled and 
died. The poor people almost died, too. From 
hunger. And bad water. And quack doctors. The 
babies' fathers wore big, bulb-y turbans on their 
heads, that looked like giant tulips; and the babies' 
mothers wore several yards of soft, clinging goods 
looped round and round them, without a single button 
to keep them in place! 

The Cobbler noticed that the families who swept 
the streets belonged to the Sweeper Caste and had 
nothing to do with the families who sold goods, and 
belonged to the Merchant Caste. He heard that 
there were over two thousand of these castes in 
India, each caste unwilling to have friendship with 
any other caste, — or to marry, or sometimes even to 
touch! Mr. Carey could never visit the high-caste 
women, because they lived cooped up indoors all the 
time, in a part of the house called the zenana, for 
high-caste husbands never allowed any other man to 
see their wives and daughters. This made life 
dreadfully stupid for the women, with nothing to do 
but loll around and tell each other foolish stories. 

It all made Mr. Carey more and more sure that 
he was needed! 

He soon discovered that little girls were married 
to quite old men; but that young or old — when the 
husband died, the wife was somehow considered 




It was the nicest kind of a little hobby, and he just sat and sat and 
sat on it, teetering up and down, clucking "g 'dap!" and "whoa!" in 
Hindustani, feeling immensely proud. 

But Mrs. Missionary had a hobby, too, the kind nobody can sit on, 
however, as it was a "loves-people- hobby" which had made her cross 
wide oceans to t each s brown, children in India; and although you can't 
see her, she has just told her Iittle^guest that if he will get off the wooden 
hobby she will tell him? £ Jesus story. 

You can see for yourself that he is dreadfully divided in his mind: he 
dotes on stories but he hates to give up this precious horse. What do 
you suppose he will do? 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 29 

guilty, and her live body was often burned with his 
dead one. Later on, Mr. Carey did all he could 
until a law was passed forbidding this horrible sacri- 
fice. But no law could help the widows who lived, — 
their pretty black hair was always shaved away, their 
tinkling bracelets and necklaces were pulled off, they 
were given old clothes to wear, and rarely had but 
one skimpy meal a day — for now they were outcastes, 
"untouchables" forever and ever! 

He could see them any day hanging wreaths of 
yellow marigolds around the necks of the "sacred" 
temple cows, or crawling on their knees from shrine 
to shrine, seeking forgiveness for their sins from those 
unblinking stone idols, which sat in stony silence 
all through the year, unmoved even by the sad 
little presents of food or flowers. Proud men in 
huge, gaudy turbans bowed their heads to the dust 
before stone elephant idols or stone monkey idols 
or any of the other twenty million idols they have in 
India, and Mr. Carey said to himself: "How hungry 
they are for peace! They need our Bible in their 
own language. The Bible made England England, 
it can make India, too." 

And so he patiently learned the queer, new words 
which the brown people softly jabbered to each 
other. He would listen all day, and study all night 
with some man, wearing a bright turban. Sometimes 
when he was off in a strange village and discovered a 
new word, he would grab a palm-leaf off a tree, 
and scratch the word on it! He even went to the na- 
tive school where little boys were tracing the queer 
hooks and curves of their Hindu alphabet in the 
sand, — and he traced letters in the sand, too. Little 



30 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

by little he learned an immense number of words, 
enough to talk to everybody and to translate the 
Bible for them. 

You will be sorry to hear how very poor he was 
just then, because not enough money could be sent 
from England to support him. He took a position 
as superintendent of an indigo factory near Cal- 
cutta, and was so honest that he saved out only 
enough money from his wages for his actual expenses, 
— all the rest he used for the Bible translation about 
which he cared so much. He preached to the thou- 
sand brown laborers in his factory, and he made 
trips in an uncomfortable, springless bullock-cart 
among two hundred of the little villages near Cal- 
cutta. But although he preached and preached and 
preached, it was seven long, hot years before a single 
brown person became a Christian. It must have 
been a little discouraging to him, but he knew that 
in the end somebody would be touched by the dear 
stories in his Bible. That "somebody" turned out 
to be Krishna Pal, who had been helping William 
Carey translate the Bible, and who was so happy 
when he accepted Christ that he wrote the beauti- 
ful hymn : — 

"0 thou, my soul, forget no more 
The Friend who all thy sorrows bore. 
Let every idol be forgot; 
But, O my souL forget Him not." 

There are about one hundred and sixty different 
languages in India, and William Carey took the im- 
mense trouble to learn over thirty-four, so that he 
could give the people a Bible in their own particular 
tongue. He made a Bengali dictionary with 80,000 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 31 

words in it, and because he was so tireless and pains- 
taking and devoted during his forty years in India, 
we can consider him as the Lamp-Lighter who gave 
the Word of God to India's 300,000,000 people. 
And yet there were other brave Lamp-Lighters in 
India, too — like Bartholomew Ziegenbalg, whose 
first Bible translation into Tamil was scratched on 
palm leaves, because paper was so scarce! There 
was Henry Martyn also, and many another famous 
man whose work began to change the brown people 
all over India, wherever the Book of books was read. 

Little by little, month after month things began to 
happen. An Englishman, named Sir Bartle Frere, 
governor of Madras Presidency, wrote home to Eng- 
land about some little villages near him where some- 
body had received just one of the sixty-six books of 
our Big Little Library. Perhaps it was Luke's 
Gospel. Anyhow, that one person read and read and 
read until he knew the message by heart; then he 
passed it on to his neighbors, and they finally decided 
to burn the idols in their temples and live as nearly 
like the Lord Jesus as possible. For in that one 
Book there was something warm and lovely that 
satisfied the hunger they felt: a hunger and longing 
which stone idols did not help. "Let us get down 
into this new religion," the low caste people said to 
each other; and you often met a sad little shut-in 
lady who said wistfully: "I think your Book must 
have been written by a woman, it is so kind to 
women!" 

Even the proud high caste people found something 
to win them in that Book. There was one man named 
Narayen Sheshadri, who belonged to the Brahman 



32 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

caste, so frightfully high caste that the villagers knelt 
and drank the very rain-pools in which he had wet 
his feet. Yet when he read our Bible, he was so 
impressed that he gave up his idols and his high 
position, to become a simple Christian preacher. 
He built a Christian village, with a school and a 
church, and spent the rest of his life passing on the 
Bible to others. 

But our busy missionaries knew that they them- 
selves were not nearly enough in number to go around 
into all the thousands of villages, and so they trained 
"Bible women," who could visit those lonely little 
ladies shut up in zenanas, and the forlorn outcaste 
beggar-women, and the despised sweepers on the 
street, and the weary laundresses down by the river 
side, and the poor women in the bazaars weaving silk 
or making cigars. The nice part about it is, that al- 
though you and I may never be able to go to India 
(or to China or Japan, either) or speak a single word 
of those strange languages, yet we can easily have 
someone of our very own "Over There" — for twenty- 
five dollars will support one of those dear Bible 
women one whole year; even supposing you had only 
two dollars to give: that would pay her salary for an 
entire month, while she visited about one hundred 
little thatched huts, telling the wonderful stories of 
Jesus to at least four hundred mothers and daughters 
and wrinkled old grannies! 

Then you wouldn't feel quite so ashamed if you 
should meet the old bent grannie who once said to 
our missionary: "How long is it since this Jesus, of 
whom you speak, died for sinful people?" When 
it was explained to her that this happened long, long 




Her Brahman father is so rich that he can load her down with loops 3f 
gold necklaces and armlets and bracelets and earrings, until she sparkles 
like a Christmas tree! Yet she never saw a Christmas tree in all her 
life, nor lighted one tiniest Christmas candle, nor heard one softest 
Christmas carol. For she is a lonely high caste child living in the zenana 
part of her Hindu home, day after day she^has nothing to do but to dress 
up and wonder what is happening]out-of-doors. 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 33 

ago, she said a bit angrily: "Then why didn't God 
let me know years before this?" 

Our missionary said that God had left the telling 
of His story to His followers (like you and me!), 
whereupon grannie said: "Then where have you 
been all this time that I have never heard this won- 
derful story? Look at me! I am now an old 
woman. All my life I have said the prayers the tem- 
ple priests have told me to say. And I have given 
alms, and gone to all the holy shrines, often crawling 
on my knees. My old body is dried up and become 
as dust with fasting. Yet now you tell me all this is 
useless because Jesus died to take away my sins. 
Tell me — where have you been all this time?" 

Unless I had helped with my money, I wouldn't 
know what to say to her, would you? For she would 
seem to expect us to be modern Lamp-Lighters! 
And we failed. 

THE BIBLE THAT HID IN A PILLOW 

ONCE there wasaBaby-Who 
Played-Church-all-the-Time ! 
You would have smiled to see 
him turn all his tiny play- 
mates into a solemn "congre- 
gation," while he thundered 
the biggest sermons at them, thumping a footstool (his 
pulpit desk, of course) and looking dreadfully im- 
portant! Babies who learn to read when they are 
three years old, and play church when they are 
four, are very apt to grow up famous, especially as 
our baby preacher liked this hymn the very best: 
"Go Preach my Gospel, saith the Lord." I am sure 




34 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

you have guessed that a boy like that would turn into 
a Lamp-Lighter some day, after he went through 
college, the brightest man in his class! 

But isn't it funny what little things decide big 
things? For it took a Thunder-storm and a Hay- 
stack to start young Adoniram Judson on his career ! 

Pitter patter! Pitter patter ! Crash bang! Down 
dashed the rain, — four young men rushed to the hay- 
stack for shelter; and, while the storm raged outside, 
those four decided they would go as missionaries, if 
God showed them the way. The hardest question 
was where the money would come from; for at that 
time in America our great-grandfathers had never 
even dreamed of sending Lamp-Lighters across the 
sea. But they were finally persuaded to form a 
society, and Mr. Judson was sent to India. 

This was in the year 1812. Like William Carey, 
he had a most uncomfortable trip over the ocean, 
lasting a year and a half ; and when he reached India, 
the East India Company still thought missionaries 
would be a perfect nuisance to have around, and so 
they would not let him land, and ordered him to go 
back home ! But Babies-Who-Play-Church generally 
grow up into Men-Who-MwsZ-Serve-God, and Adoni- 
ram Judson knew that he simply could not go back 
to America; and after much trouble he sailed across 
to Burma, landing in Rangoon. 

Burma is really a part of India, although entirely 
different in almost every way. Moreover, India was 
governed by England, but Burma was ruled by a hea- 
then King, like the wicked ones in fairy stories who 
have an unpleasant fashion of chopping off their 
subjects' heads whenever they feel like it! 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 35 

The Burmans worship an idol called Buddha, — 
there were large images of him where people went 
with their offerings, and tiny images which sat on 
little god-shelves in the Burmese "Houses-on-Stilts." 
For the Burmans build their houses up in the air on 
four posts to keep them dry in the rainy season, and 
to keep the snakes away, too. 

Can't you make a little picture in your mind of 
our Mr. Judson climbing up some rickety ladder to a 
little House-on-Stilts, where he would sit cross- 
legged on the dirty bamboo floor, telling the aston- 
ished brown mothers and fathers about the real 
God whom he wished they would have in their home, 
instead of a little brass Buddha? All of which made 
the Priests-in-yellow-robes very mad. They were 
lazy fellows who went through the streets every day 
with little boys who carried begging-bowls, into 
which devoted housewives put cooked rice and fish 
for the yellow-robed priest to eat, — for this was the 
way to please Buddha, said the priests! Yet they 
themselves never looked at these women who handed 
out food, for Buddha had told his followers that 
women were not even as good as animals and so the 
lofty priest kept a fan tucked inside his gown, which 
could be whipped out and held before his face, lest 
he catch even the tiniest glimpse of such sinful crea- 
tures. 

Adoniram Judson knew he had just the message 
for such slighted mothers and girls, but it was very 
slow work making them believe, for not only did he 
have to learn the language, but he had to convince 
the people that his religion was better. I suppose 
they wondered and wondered about this strange 



36 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

white-man- who-ate-their-relatives ! For you must 
know that Buddhists believe that when a person dies 
his spirit is re-born and comes back to earth in some 
other form, — perhaps as a dog, or a cat, or a cow, or 
a snake, or a fly. No Burman dares kill animal, in- 
sect, bird, or reptile, for how could he know whether 
it was his very own grandfather or not! Yet here 
was Mr. Judson swatting flies, and killing snakes, 
and eating "relatives" at every meal; the people 
were scandalized. Yet when Mr. and Mrs. Judson 
told these poor, scared people about Heaven, and 
about the kind Heavenly Father who never sent 
anybody back to earth as a toad or a cow, I suppose 
they wondered and wondered still more. But it 
was seven long years before a single Burman believed 
the good news enough to become a Christian; all 
those years Mr. Judson kept translating the Bible 
into their language so that when they could read the 
wonderful stories for themselves they might be more 
readily convinced. Although this Lamp-Lighter had 
those seven blue years, he wrote home to America 
that "the prospects were as bright as the promises of 
God!" 

After ten years in Rangoon, the Judsons decided 
to move to Ava where the wicked King lived. But 
they had hardly settled down when England began a 
war with Burma, and the Burman King at once 
clapped every white man into prison, saying they 
were spies; even Adoniram Judson, who was Ameri- 
can, and not English, at all. 

There aren't ugly enough words to describe that 
prison, which was all one room, with no windows 
and only one door. The hot Burman sun beat down 




No, they aren't dressed up, they are just dressed. As usual! For 
they always wear their hair screwed into cunning little top-knots, and 
their tight hobble skirts always reach clear down to the [ground. "Num- 
ber two" is smiling because she loves being at oui Burman mission school; 
indeed they all love it, although both "number four" and "number five" 
seem a little shy about looking at the camera, don't you think so? 

You can see one of the school buildings in the background. Surely 
in their own quiet way these five little maids-in-a-row will be quite as 
important in Burma as any nine gorgeous young princes, coming to 
school on nine lumbering elephants, with eighteen gold umbrellas to keep 
off the sun. For some day the five girls may be teachers in our mission 
schools, or doctors in our mission hospitals, or the mothers of dimply 
brown babies in some new little houses-on-stilts. "God bless them every 
one." 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 37 

on the roof until the prison felt like a fiery furnace. 
Inside were one hundred miserable prisoners, whom 
the cruel guards tortured in every possible way. Mr. 
Judson was a prisoner for eleven months there; all 
that time he had three pairs of iron fetters bound 
around his ankles so tightly that the scars lasted all 
his life. At night the guards cruelly passed a bam- 
boo pole between the feet of the prisoners, then raised 
the pole to the ceiling, leaving the poor men with 
only their heads and shoulders touching the floor, 
until morning. 

At three o'clock each afternoon a Big Stillness 
settled over the prison; a gong outside struck the 
hour, and in stalked the hideous spotted executioner. 
Nobody knew but that it was his turn to die now! 
The King had a caged lion outside the prison; the 
prisoners knew by its awful bellowings that it was 
being starved, and they supposed that they them- 
selves were to be fed to it when their turn came. 
But the lion died of hunger before this could be done, 
and plucky Mrs. Judson cleaned out that cage and 
persuaded the governor to let her husband be im- 
prisoned out there alone, since he was very, very ill 
with fever. 

And he was worried, too! About his precious 
translation of the Bible, — for it had not been printed 
yet, and was just a hand-written copy. He knew 
the Burmans were ransacking every white man's 
home, stealing things right and left. But Mrs. 
Judson was very clever, and hid those carefully 
written pages in the safest kind of a hiding-place: 
a pillow! She then brought it to his prison, and no- 
body dreamed that the white man's head rested all 
night on the Word of God! 



38 Larnp-Lighters Across the Sea 

But lo! and behold, Mr. Jailor saw that pillow and 
wanted it. Nothing was simpler than to grab it! 

Mrs. Judson brought a better pillow to the prison 
the next day, however, and Mr. Judson offered to 
swap! The surprised jailor was more than willing, 
of course, wondering why he was so lucky. 

But, after eleven months in this Ava prison, Mr. 
Judson was taken to a second one at Aung-Pen-La. 
As the prisoners were leaving Ava, a guard stole the 
Judson pillow, for he very much wanted the matting 
cover! He ripped it off, and carelessly tossed the 
cotton stuffing away, little dreaming of the hidden 
treasure. 

You can imagine how poor Mr. Judson felt, seeing 
ten years of hard work lost in one little minute. 
But just as God used little Mary Jones to start some- 
thing bigger than she ever dreamed of, so he now 
used a Burman servant of the Judsons, named Moung 
Ing. He was a faithful fellow, who had done every- 
thing he could for them during all this time, — without 
pay, too, since they had no money. Yet he never 
complained, and on the day when the guard carelessly 
tossed aside the cotton wadding of the pillow, Moung 
Ing happened to see it beside the empty prison. He 
knew that it was part of his master's old pillow, and 
he kept it as a souvenir of the gentle white man, 
whom he never expected to see again. For had not 
the King of Burma boasted about going to Aung- 
Pen-La, to murder the prisoners, gloating over their 
sufferings? 

But England won the war with Burma, whereupon 
the King was imprisoned, and the white prisoners set 
free. By and by when happy Moung Ing showed 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 39 

Mr. Judson his pet souvenir, there to his complete 
surprise was the precious Bible safe and sound. You 
can imagine how thankful Mr. Judson felt, for of all 
our Lamp-Lighters he certainly had suffered the 
most, and had not dared dream of such a good ending ! 

People admire everything about Adoniram Jud- 
son, he was so brave and devoted to his work. Even 
when in prison he said to a fellow prisoner: "I have 
been in Burma ten years preaching the Gospel to timid 
listeners who wished to embrace the truth, but dared 
not; beseeching the King to grant liberty of con- 
science to his people, but without success; and now 
when all human means seemed at an end, God opens 
the way by leading a Christian nation to subdue the 
country. It is possible that my life maybe spared; 
if so, with what ardor and gratitude shall I pursue 
my work! And, if not, His will be done; the door 
will be opened for others who will do the work 
better." 

He lived in Burma twenty-four years after that; 
he saw his translated Bible scattered far and wide; 
and when he died, there were over 7,000 Christians 
among the brown people of Burma, where there had 
not been one when he first landed ! Because he light- 
ed the lamp of the Bible, he made it easier for our 
missionaries today to carry his book everywhere. 

One of the stories I especially like is about the son 
of the cruel King who kept Mr. Judson in prison. 
Forty years later, this son was King of Burma, and 
he sent for a missionary, named Dr. Marks, to ask 
him to start Christian schools in Mandalay. 

Dr. Marks took with him a copy of Mr. Judson* s 
Burman Bible, beautifully covered with gold by 



40 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

the British and Foreign Bible Society in London. 
Wouldn't you like to have seen this magnificent 
King accepting the gleaming Book with pleased 
smiles? Then I know you would like to have gone 
to the school which the King built for Dr. Marks! 
For the King sent nine of his sons to it — imagine what 
a commotion it must have caused every morning 
when nine gorgeous princes, sitting on nine proud 
elephants, with eighteen gold umbrellas, drew up at 
the school door, with four hundred soldiers for escort ! 

Mary's Little Lamb could not have "made the 
scholars laugh and play" nearly as much as nine 
dressy princes (not to mention those nine elephants 
and the eighteen gold umbrellas!) 

But princes and peasants are all exactly alike in- 
side, even in Burma. And although thousands upon 
thousands of brown girls and boys do not arrive 
at our Christian schools on elephants, protected by 
soldiers and gold umbrellas, yet they are going to be 
the ones who will really rule Burma some day! Be- 
cause deep in their hearts will be the words from Mr. 
Judson's Bible, words that will send them out to be 
kind to their neighbors and so obedient to God that 
even the coolies out in the paddy fields and the stoop- 
ed laborers on the tea plantations will understand 
what David meant in the Psalms: "The grass 
withereth and the flower thereof passeth away, but 
the word of the Lord liveth forever." 




"Now that we've got him what are you going to do with him?" they 
seem to be asking us a little anxiously. 

The small boy in white is dreadfully in earnest about it, for he knows 
there isn't one extra inch of room in our Chinese mission where a new 
boy could be tucked away to sleep or to study. But the little girl in the 
flowered jacket just smiles and smiles at us. She has sunny little pic- 
tures in her mind's eye of the new school you and I will want to build 
very, very soon. 

And meanwhile, he must wait and wait until we get ready for him. 
No wonder he looks on the point of tears. Waiting is such tiresome 
business! 




Little Three-Years-Old is thinking it over. For something very 
delightful has certainly happened to her mother. She used to be tired 
and unhappy when she went to the gorgeous temple and beat a large drum 
to wake up the hideous red-and-gold-idol-with-the-staring-eyes. Now 
she sits at home with anew black Book always open on her knees; every 
day she slowly spells out a few new sentences and says: "Good! So good! 
I was hungry for this !" 

And every seven days^'she says to Little Three-Years-Old: "Come, 
it is the Lord's Day. Let us go to worship." But there is no drum, 
no idol, no gorgeous temple. Just lovely songs and quietness. 

Little Three- Years-Old thinks it must be that little black Book which 
has made all the difference! 



CHAPTER III. 



"Growing Behind Darkened Windows." 

"For the Word of God is quick and power- 
ful and sharper than any two-edged 
sword .... a discerner of the thoughts 
and intents of the heart' 9 (Hebrews 
iv,12) 



CHAPTER III. 



"Growing Behind Darkened Windows" 

There was once a Scotch boy who decided that 
he wanted something hard to do; and so when he 
grew up they sent him to China — the very first 
Chinese Lamp-Lighter. 

A sneering shipowner looked him up and down 
before he sailed, saying: "And so, Mr. Morrison, you 
really expect you will make an impression on the 
idolatry of the great Chinese Empire?" 

"No, sir; I expect God wll," said Robert Morrison 
smiling, and all through his long trip from England 
to China he knew it was going to be hard work. But 
then, ever since he became a Christian at fifteen, had 
he not been a Boy-Who-Wanted-Something-Hard- 
to-Do? 

He got it, too! 

For, when he landed in Canton, nobody wanted 
him — the Chinese officials bitterly hated "foreign 
devils from over the ocean," and had forbidden the 
people to teach these foreigners the Chinese language. 
Yet here he was in this "City of Broad East" which 
lies at the foot of the White Cloud Hills. Great walls 
stood all around the city, and its twelve gates (called 
"Great Peace," "Eternal Rest," etc.) were tightly 
closed at night. The streets had curious names — 
"Martial Dragon Street," "New Green Pea Street," 
"Old Clothes Street," "Firecracker Ally,"— and they 
smelled horribly because of the open sewers and de- 
caying garbage. The quaint houses had red tiled 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 48 

roofs, which tipped up sharply at the corners to 
bounce away any naughty evil spirits who came fly- 
ing along to poke their noses indoors ! For you must 
know that the Chinese believe that the air is full of 
mischievous evil spirits who love to tease people; 
indeed, the people wondered what awful new evil 
spirits had tagged along with this "foreign devil 
from over the ocean," and mothers hid their precious 
babies when Mr. Morrison appeared! 

Finally, to make himself less conspicuous, he dress- 
ed in Chinese clothes, even to a nice long, black 
pigtail like all the other men, and he let his finger- 
nails grow as long as they would to be like a real 
Chinese scholar; he ate strange Chinese food with 
Chinese chopsticks, and he slept on a Chinese brick 
bed and even said his prayers in Chinese, so that he 
might learn this difficult new language more quickly. 

Somebody watched him all the time — a Chinese 
Somebody in a blue gown, who reported to Somebody 
else every single thing he did all day long. It was 
hard for him to buy simple things like paper and ink, 
for nobody dared deal with the "foreign devil"; 
it was even harder to find any Chinese who would 
dare teach him the language; it was hard for him to 
eat the queer food, and to be shadowed day and 
night; it was hard for him to keep well in his dark, 
dank room, which was really a cellar. But then, he 
had known it was going to be hard before he came. 
Back in England they had told him it would be 
years before it would be safe to send a missionary 
to teach and preach, for the Chinese would surely 
kill such a man; but a Lamp-Lighter, silently getting 
the Bible ready, would be helping for years and years 
to come. 



44 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

He began learning the language. And that was 
hard, too ! For there are forty thousand queer-look- 
ing characters which must be learned, a different 
character for each word, which is much harder than 
learning the twenty-six simple letters of our A B C's 
and then making words out of the letters. Said the 
Chinese teacher to Mr. Morrison: "Now listen. 
When you have 'heart 9 to the left and 'blood' to the 
right, the character means 'to pity 9 ; but when you 
have 'heart 9 on one side and 'star 9 on the other, it 
means 'wake up 9 When there is 'hand 9 on one side 
and 'foot 9 on the other, it means 'to take hold 9 When 
'water 9 is on one side and 'stand up 9 on the other, the 
character means 'to cry 9 ! When 'grass 9 is on top and 
'name 9 is down below, it means 'tea 9 — have you got 
it?" 

And so on and so on till poor Mr. Morrison's brain 
grew dizzy! There were seven different tones or 
ways of sounding the characters, and one tone 
might mean a verb and another a noun. Do you 
wonder that some years later another Chinese Lamp- 
Lighter, named Dr. Milne, said that to learn Chinese 
one must have "a chest of oak, nerves of steel, the 
patience of Job, and the years of Methusaleh!" 

Mr. Morrison was clever at it, however, and made 
a huge dictionary, carefully explaining the different 
characters for other Englishmen, but this was after 
his Bible was finished, of course. All the time he 
kept hoping that, even if he could not preach or 
teach openly, he might secretly win some of the 
Chinese people to give up their idols and their dread 
of evil spirits. He had a quiet little "church" serv- 
ice in his own dark room every Sunday morning, but 




"Six of one and^half a dozen of the other!''' For sometimes all six of 
them are just as good asjgood can be, and sometimes halloa dozen of them 
are really exceedingly naughty ! 

Yet every new day they learn more and more Bible stories about the 
Friend of Little Children, until already there is a big wish growing in 
their hearts to be Lamp-Lighters themselves some day. 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 45 

nothing happened for seven long years; then one of 
the men who had helped him in the translation of the 
Bible was baptized! It was a happy day for Mr. 
Morrison, you may be sure! He wrote in his diary: 
"May he be the first-fruits of a great harvest, one of 
millions who shall come and be saved." 

He himself never had many converts, and I wish 
that during those twelve quiet years when he was 
secretly stooping over his desk, translating the Bible 
in a darkened room, he could have known what won- 
derful adventures it was going to have in China, and 
what a Lamp-Lighter he was to be to millions of 
yellow people ! 

For when the eight volumes of his Chinese Bible 
were printed, Christians were found who were eager 
to pack them into wheelbarrows and trundle them off 
to distant villages in the hills. People read them 
with such delight and surprise that the disgusted 
priests and the proud mandarins grew worried, and 
finally put up huge red placards in various cities. 
Any time of day or night you could have seen a circle 
of blue-robed-gentlemen-with-queues excitedly read- 
ing this ridiculous placard: "The books that the for- 
eigner is selling are printed with ink made of stupefying 
medicine. When anyone reads them for a time, he 
becomes stupified and loses his natural reason, and be- 
lieves and follows the false doctrine. This is to warn 
the Chinese not to read them. Again, the foreigners use 
much money to bribe the poorer Chinese who have no 
means to depend on. They also use the stupefying 
medicine in all sorts of food, in order to win over the 
little children. At times they use it for kidnapping 
children, to sell to other foreigners who then take away 



46 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

their marrow. The children die at once. Wherever 
foreigners come, families ought to warn their children 
not to go out." 

The excited Chinese gentlemen then began telling 
one another alarming stories : — they said that queues 
were cut off in the streets by invisible Christian hands 
in broad daylight! That paper men were sent up in- 
to the air, assumed terrible aspects, and settled on 
Chinamen who languished and died under the evil 
Christian spell! That Christian converts were 
drugged with the eyes of dead Chinamen! These 
untrue tales were repeated from one end of China to 
the other, until both foreigners and new converts 
were looked upon with terror. 

Yet the Book quietly went from town to town, and, 
because the Chinese rarely destroy even a printed 
page, they tucked the Bibles away on some shelf; 
and years later, possibly, they were taken down and 
read with joy. In Pok-lo, not very far from Canton, 
a copy of the New Testament was given to old 
Ch'ea, the guardian of the temple of Confucius. 
When he read it, he believed every word, he resigned 
his guardianship of the temple and destroyed the 
idols his family had worshipped since his great- 
great-grandfather's time. After he was baptized, 
he went from village to village, bearing on his shoul- 
ders a board covered with wonderful verses from the 
Bible; people curiously crowded around him, and 
back in his own town of Pok-lo, one hundred and 
eighty of the people became Christians. But, when 
the idol festivals came around, Ch'ea destroyed 
several of the public idols, and the townspeople and 
the priests were so enraged that they tortured him 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 47 

for three days, trying to make him give up the Lord 
Jesus; when he refused, they spitefully killed him. 
But his Bibles kept right on speaking, silently and 
surely; and Christianity spread. 

There came a day in the year 1894 when the Chris- 
tian women in China decided to send a present to the 
Empress Dowager on her sixtieth birthday. You 
may think of her as a grim, old soul like the Queen of 
Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, who thought 
nothing of shouting "Off with his head!" (For the 
Empress Dowager had once had to kill seven princes 
who were just as anxious to rule China as she was!) 
But on her birthday all her subjects sent marvelous 
presents, among which was a big pine box. You 
must imagine the court ladies standing around in 
their gold-embroidered silk jackets, craning their 
necks to see what was coming out next! Inside the 
pine box was a beautifully carved teakwood box — 
oh, how the ladies clucked with suspense! And in- 
side the teakwood box was a red plush box, for red is 
the sign of happiness, and everyone nodded her sleek 
black head ! Next came a glimmering silver box, and 
inside that lay a Book, which weighed four and a 
half pounds, and had satin paper leaves, bordered 
with a gold design, with silver covers exquisitely 
chased in a design of birds (meaning "messengers") 
and bamboo ("peace"). Nobody knows to this day 
whether the Empress ever read a single word of her 
birthday Bible, but in the palace lived the young 
Emperor, who wanted one for himself and so he sent 
a servant dashing over to a Mr. Missionary in Pekin 
to buy a copy. This turned out to be just an ordi- 
nary Bible, but he was so interested that he sent back 



48 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

to Mr. Missionary's for other Christian books and 
American school books, too, — which were full of 
many sensible facts about the air and the earth, as 
you yourself know! He couldn't help learning that 
the air is not full of evil spirits, and that the earth 
does not rest on the back of a huge dragon, after all ! 
He decided it was perfectly safe to dig mines to get 
coal and silver; indeed, there began to be changes 
from that very day — pleasant changes for our mis- 
sionaries, who saw railroads and telegraph poles and 
other foreign improvements coming into China for 
the first time ! 

The petrified Chinamen in the coast cities finally 
grew quite used to traveling on the "fire- wheel cart" 
(train) and in the "fire- wheel boat" (steamer); they 
enjoyed listening to the funny "talk-box" (phono- 
graph) that said things like a sure-enough person! 
Clothes could be sewed up in a jiffy on the foreigner's 
noisy "iron tailor" (sewing machine) and, if you were 
brave enough to stare calmly into a queer little black 
box with a tiny window in front (camera), you could 
actually hold a likeness of yourself in your hand next 
day. It was amazing what these "foreign devils" 
could invent! Mr. Missionary was a regular drum- 
mer, for wherever he went he left behind him a crowd 
of yellow people clamoring for a watch and a jack- 
knife and a kerosene lamp just like his! But they 
wanted his little black Book just as badly; after all, 
it was a pleasant doctrine. 

The Men-Who-Sell-Bibles (we call them Colpor- 
teurs) carried their books far and wide, and people 
read the stories and begged for teachers to explain 
the hard places to them. Schools sprang up, and 




Honorable Miss Cradle-That- Walks-on-Two-Feet sucks her under 
lip very hard, when Humpty-Dumpty slips further down her back. 

You have noticed his American shoes, haven't you? And her Chinese 
ones? 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 49 

even girls learned how to read and write! girls? 
Almost any Chinese father would have said it was 
simply impossible; "maybe my cow could learn, or 
the hen, — but surely not my good-for-nothing stupid 
female child!" But of course she could, and she did; 
so that daughters began to be a-1-m-o-s-t as good as 
sons! 

Then came the Boxers! In case you have never 
heard of them, let me explain that they were terrible 
men, who were so furious at all foreigners, and at 
Chinese Christians especially, that they decided to 
stamp them out of China entirely. They tried to 
frighten the Chinese Christians into giving up their 
new religion by going to house after house, summon- 
ing everybody out doors. 

"We will save your lives," shouted the Boxer 
captain, "if you will stamp your feet on this cross," 
and he would trace a cross in the dust of the street 
with the end of his sword. 

There they stood: — grannie and grandpa, father, 
mother, aunts, uncles, and children, all in their blue 
gowns, with prim queues down their backs. It would 
have been so easy to walk on the cross, you know! 
Just one little step, and they would have been safe! 
But Grandpa shook his trembly, old head — oh, no, 
he couldn't do that! And Grannie said, no, neither 
could she. Mother and father shook their heads, too, 
and even the children said, "Oh, no, not we!" and the 
very babies wagged their cute heads around, copying 
mother! Yet they all knew what was coming, for 
the Boxers had already been next door, maybe, and 
killed their Christian neighbors who had also said 
no! 



50 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

Ten thousand Chinese Christians were killed for 
being brave, and refusing to tread on the cross of the 
dear Saviour, who meant so much to them. Almost 
two hundred missionaries were killed, also; and over 
here in America people were saying: "Well, this is 
the end of mission work in China ! Nobody will ever 
dare become a Christian now, or buy a Bible, or 
read it!" 

But it was just the other way around! For there 
were hundreds of Chinese families who rushed to the 
hills to escape the Boxers, yet they took time to hide 
their precious Bibles, and there must have been 
many a mother who said: "Heavenly Son, behold, 
I will hide the good Book here under this rock; do 
thou remember where it is, for I fear me we shall 
never see our dear, white teachers again." And, 
as they hid in caves, or were tortured in prison, they 
whispered to one another comforting words from 
Robert Morrison's Bible: "Blessed are they which 
are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is 
the Kingdom of Heaven." 

Later on, when it was safe to return home, they 
found their Bibles safely hidden in the rocks and 
cellars, and Christianity was more popular than be- 
fore, for heathen neighbors were curious about the 
"foreigner's Book" which made men and women 
fearless, and kept even little children from blubber- 
ing when Soldiers-with-Swords stood ready to hurt 
them. There was one province, Shantung, where 
colporteurs had sold 10,800 Bibles in 1900, before 
the Boxer uprising; but in the next year, 1901, they 
sold 32,000 copies; in 1902 — 81,000 copies; while in 
1903 the number grew to 88,685 copies. It has kept 
on growing, too. 



Lamp-Lighters Across Die Sea 51 

The Bible can't help being a Best Seller, because 
when God made His family He tucked inside each 
of us a big hunger for some Big Somebody to love us. 
The yellow people know all about that hungry long- 
ing, — yet then stone idols are such chilly, unblinking 
images that children are always frightened; and poor 
old grannies, afraid to die, shudder while they wor- 
ship! But it is on the pages of the Lamp-Lighter's 
Bible that grannie reads of the beautiful mansions 
the Lord Jesus is preparing for her in His heaven; 
and little Eight-Years-Old slowly spells out the 
good news of a God who is a Friend of Little Children, 
opening His gentle arms to bless them all. 

The best part about it is that without learning a 
single word of Chinese, or translating one littlest 
minute behind a darkened window, you and I can be 
Lamp-Lighters in China. For think of it, my dears, 
— one crinkly dollar bill will buy fifty copies of the 
Bible, to be given to grannie and little Eight- Years - 
Old and all their neighbors as a present from you and 
me! 

It would be fun to write more about China and 
pretend to trundle you in a "Bible wheelbarrow," 
to see for yourself what kind of superstitious villages 
the colporteurs visit. But instead of trundling, we 
must let our minds sail south on a short trip to the 
Land of the Closed Book, where our cousins, the 
Filipinos, live! Cousins — because our Uncle Sam is 
now their uncle, too. 

You will see the Philippine Islands lying in the 
Pacific Ocean south of China, and I think you will be 
startled to hear that, although our cousins there have 
worshipped the Lord Jesus for over 400 years, yet 



52 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

they never have had Bibles until lately. You see, it 
was & forbidden Book, just as it had been up in heathen 
China, only here it was the Catholic priests them- 
selves who refused to let the people read it. They 
did not seem to care that this made them almost as 
superstitious as Chinese idolators. 

Just to show you how the priests behaved, here is 
a story about Sefior Paulino Zamora, who had a 
Spanish Bible about forty years ago, but he did not 
dare to keep it in his home in Manila, and so he moved 
far away to study it quietly. But somehow the 
priests and the Spanish authorities (who ruled the 
Philippines) heard that he was reading the Bible to 
his neighbors, and so he was put in prison and the 
forbidden Book snatched away. Finally he was 
banished to an island in the Mediterranean Sea! 

But one fine day the Spanish no longer ruled the 
Philippines, for American warships had arrived to 
free the oppressed people. That was when we all 
got to be "cousins"! Uncle Sam has been looking 
after the people ever since then, and we have been 
sending over missionaries and Lamp-Lighters; for al- 
most every island, and even parts of islands, speak 
a different language. 

The Filipinos live in little villages, called barrios, 
and it was not long before colporteurs took the Bibles 
which the Lamp-Lighters had translated, and slung 
them in bags over their backs, so that they could 
bicycle up into the hills to distant barrios; or stowed 
them in canoes, and paddled down rivers aswarm 
with alligators; or packed them in big two- wheeled 
wagons drawn by awkward carabaoes. There was 
a real hunger among the people for the true stories 




Surely you will be glad to meet Katie and Olive Woo, for they dressed 
themselves especially to have their pictures taken for you! Their hair- 
ribbons are quite American, as you can see, but'their neat' iittle^trousers 
and that monstrous big parasol are altogether Chinese. Perhaps you 
have guessed that they are Christians, too. Why? Because their feet 
are not bound into the painful "golden lilies" on which thejpoor heathen 
girls must hobble. 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 53 

about this Lord Jesus whom they had worshipped 
ignorantly so many years. Like an old woman, 
named Narcissa, who had been praying for over two 
years that someone might come to teach the Bible. 
You may be sure she welcomed the missionaries as 
"angels of God!" The humble little service held in 
her house has grown and grown, until by this time 
there is a strong church in that town. 

You would have delightful cold shivers, if I could 
tell you in detail about a certain "Hold Up" story! 
For once there was a missionary traveling alone 
through a tropical forest, when some very gruesome 
bandits jumped out on him and forced him to come 
with them to their wild camp deep in the thickets. 
I suppose Mr. Missionary expected to be stripped 
of his watch and his money and his clothes, at the 
very least, but when he reached their camp, the out- 
laws tossed aside their weapons and said pleasantly 
that if Sefior pleased they would now like to have 
the Bible explained to them! They had stolen a 
peasant's basket of vegetables one day, and in 
it were some torn pages from a Bible. They had 
read them with surprise, seeing plainly that it said 
you must love your enemies, which they never had 
done! They had sent several times for a teacher, 
but always in vain; and so now they had just kid- 
napped one. 

How that beaming missionary must have explained 
and explained and explained; for in the Philippines, 
as in China, "the word of God is quick and powerful, 
sharper than any two-edged sword .... a discerner 
of the thoughts and intents of the heart." 



CHAPTER IV. 

The Book Fished Out of the Water" 

"The entrance of thy word giveth light, 
it giveth understanding unto the simple. 
(psalm cxix, 130.) 




Behold four of our littlest Japanese missionaries, although they don't 
even dream they are anything as important as that; but they are! For 
their Buddhist mothers and fathers had their minds all made up against 
Christianity. But these cunning mites went to our mission Kinder- 
garten where they learned the prettiest "Jesus songs" and heard such 
beautiful "Jesus stories" that when they went home they babbled happi- 
ly about it all day long. Day in and day out., you know! Until their 
fathers and mothers unconsciously hummed the little Jesus tunes while 
they worked, and remembered the wonderful stories of Jesus again and 
again. Exactly as the Bible says: "And a Utile child shall lead them.'' 



CHAPTER IV. 

"The Book Fished Out of the Water" 

It was no fun at all for the Three-Men-in-a-Tub ! 

Fierce winds blew the waves up into giant moun- 
tains of water, and their poor little tub bounced 
around trying to sail every which way at once! 
Buckets of water dashed over the deck, washings away 
the mast and soaking the Three Men to the skin. 
They had no idea where they were on this big, track- 
less Pacific Ocean, so "Lucky Rock," who was the 
oldest (he was twenty-eight) drew his flapping ki- 
mono about him, as he said to "Lasting Happiness" 
(who was fifteen) that no doubt the gods were very 
angry at them all, and, as for him, he "threw away 
the spoon" and was ready to go to his departed an- 
cestors ! 

But "Happy Sound" (fourteen) wanted to live and 
he tried to make a new mast and bale out the water, 
but even when the big gale swirled off somewhere 
else their silly little tub just bobbed around in the 
ocean day after day, drifting wherever the wind 
blew it. It drifted for fourteen months, while the 
Three Men grew hungrier and hungrier, for their 
food and water gave out; and I suppose they thought 
to themselves that if only the Emperor of Japan had 
not made a rule that all Japanese boats must be small 
unseaworthy junks, then they need not have had 
this horrible adventure. The truth of the matter 
was that the Emperor simply hated foreigners, and 
he wanted his subjects to stay in Japan, and so he 



56 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

f orebade them to make ships fit to sail on the rough 
seas — just little junks that had to hug the shores. 
He made it death for a foreigner to enter his closed 
realm, and death for a native to leave. 

But little did the Emperor dream that God was 
planning to use those Three-Men-in-a-Tub as Lamp- 
Lighters ! They did not dream about it either, poor 
fellows! They only knew that the junk dashed to 
pieces on the rocks of Oregon one day (here in our 
own America — just see how far they had drifted!) 
and that a tribe of Red Indians swooped down on the 
wreck with hideous war whoops, making the Three 
Men prisoners. But the Hudson Bay Company 
rescued them and started them back home, — but 
they reached China instead of Japan! And a Lamp- 
Lighter named Mr. Gutzlaff took good care of them, 
knowing God was giving him this splendid chance to 
learn the Japanese language, which no foreigner 
dared to enter Japan to learn. 

After two years, he took the sailors over to Japan, 
but the forts at Yeddo opened fire on his ship, and 
the Government utterly refused to have the Three 
Men back again, because they considered them 
Traitors- Who-Had-Run-Away-f rom-Home-ag a i n s t 
Rules! But the nice part about it was that over in 
China Mr. Gutzlaff had the Gospel of Matthew and 
the Book of Genesis translated, all ready for the day 
that would surely come when Japan would be open 
to everybody. 

Then things began to happen! 

For sixteen years later, in 1853, on the eighth day 
of July, there was a booming of guns, and four of our 
own big warships sailed into Yeddo Harbor (now 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 57 

Tokyo) bearing a treaty of friendship and commerce 
from the President of the United States. What 
could even a poor Emperor do then? The treaty was 
signed, and before long other nations claimed the 
right to enter Japan, too. 

But you could still see this edict printed on plac- 
ards wherever foreigners were permitted to land: — 
"*So long as the sun shall warm the earth, let no Christian 
be so bold as to come to Japan; and let all know that the 
King of Spain himself, or the Christian's God, or the 
great God of All, if he violate this command, shall pay 
for it with his head!" 

Which just shows you how brave and plucky our 
Lamp-Lighters were, for already they were planning 
to live there and translate the Bible. 

But before the missionaries themselves started 
work, God sent a small inconspicuous silent Lamp- 
Lighter into Japan in the most curious fashion, in 
spite of all prohibitions! For a certain Dutch sailor 
leaned against the deck railing of a certain Dutch 
ship, and as it was night he never knew that some- 
thing square and black fell out of his pocket and 
splashed into the inky waters below. 

The next morning as this "something" was bobbing 
around on the crinkly blue waves a fisherman caught 
it in his net, and because it was neither a fish nor 
anything Japanese, he scratched his nice old black 
head and carried it to Wakasa Murata, Commander 
of the Japanese troops guarding that port. 

Wakasa knew that it was a book, of course, and 
when it got dry he looked at it curiously, and began 
to hunt for somebody who could tell him what the 
Dutch words were about! He found that over in 



58 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

China he could buy a copy of the Book in a language 
he could read, so he sent to Shanghai, and, when 
the new book reached him, he and his brother Ayabe 
and a relative named Molino grew perfectly fas- 
cinated by the words of eternal life which satisfied 
the big hunger they had always felt for a God who was 
everything. Once more three Japanese men did 
something to start Christianity in Japan, for, after 
two years of reading and studying, they were bap- 
tized by Dr. Guido Verbeck — the first Japanese 
converts. They were important men in the eyes of 
the other Japanese people, because they were noble- 
men, and it was not long before other young men 
wanted to know about the new religion which the 
three nobles admired so deeply. Dr. Verbeck 
started the Imperial University of Tokyo for these 
young men, and he translated the Bible into Japanese 
for them — yet it all began with that silent little 
Lamp-Lighter which was fished out of the water and 
which lighted so many Japanese feet along the road 
to Christ. 

And now I want to tell you about another Japanese 
boy named Osaki Neesima. His story begins some 
years before the Bible was fished out of the water 
when Neesima was only a boy. First of all, let me 
tell you what a quaint lovely land Japan is, full of 
dear little thatched-roofed houses, some with a 
cunning garden and a tiny lake, over which gnarled 
old cherry trees crook themselves, exactly as if they 
wanted to see their charming reflections in the smooth 
water! Sometimes the garden is not much bigger 
than a pocket handkerchief: but the Japanese know 
just how to make it look very pretty with prim little 




She has tucked her knees under her in the correct Japanese fashion 
and has already spent hours arranging these three chrysanthemums. 
This way and that way she has tried them, with her pretty head first on 
one side and then on the other, while her Japanese teacher sits by guiding 
her to make a graceful arrangement. For that is one of the things 
every well-bred Japanese girl is taught to do — to place a few flowers 
(oh, a very very few) in a vase in the most artistic fashion. They think 
our bouquets with dozens of flowers are very poor taste, indeed! 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 59 

flat stepping-stones from the verandah to the lake, 
and wistaria tumbling all over itself to decorate the 
house. Indoors, there are walls made of heavy paper 
screens and floors of soft matting; very dainty and 
restful, — yet something is wrong! 

It all comes from a certain shelf where the house- 
hold idols sit in a solemn unblinking row. Neesima 
had had his doubts about those idols for years, for 
when they were knocked over on their honorable 
noses they never picked themselves up — they had to 
wait for the little maid-servant to do it! That stu- 
pid little maid-servant in a blue kimono. Neesima 
wondered how they could be really important, when 
they were so helpless. Yet their names were high- 
sounding: there was the God of Long Life, the God 
of Wealth, the Goddess of Mercy with her thousand 
hands, there was the children's special god around 
whose neck Neesima's mother hung a little bib when 
he (Neesima) was sick — for she thought it was the 
only way to please the god and persuade it to send 
good health back to her little boy. There were many 
other idols, to whom you offered a little bowl of rice 
every morning, so that they might protect you all 
day. But Neesima had his doubts! One day he 
snatched one of them off the god-shelf, tiptoed out 
into the quaint little garden, dug a hole and buried 
the little brass idol deep down in the earth. 

"Honorable god," he whispered, "if you can come 
out of the hole by yourself then I will serve you, but 
if you can't help yourself, how can you ever help 
me?" 

Then he waited. And waited. And waited. One 
morning he saw a tiny green spear of something-or- 



60 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

other poking itself out of the brown earth! You can 
imagine how excitedly he knelt down, gently moving 
the earth to one side until he dug down to the idol. 
There lay the foolish little bronze thing, exactly as it 
had been before, but on the palm of its hand a little 
kernel of rice had lodged, left over from an offering 
several days before. God's sun and rain had made 
that little seed split open its shiny white coat so it 
could grow up and up toward the light. And Neesima 
saw with his own eyes that a mere seed had more 
power to help itself than the bronze idol before which 
his whole family knelt, politely bumping their glossy 
black heads on the floor! 

He never forgot that experience, and grew up won- 
dering and wondering about things. Years later his 
family sent him to college at Yeddo, and when he was 
eighteen he came across a geography primer, written 
by an American missionary, which began with the 
marvelous words: "In the beginning God created the 
heaven andthe earth." Over and over he read the words 
that are so familiar to you and me; but to him they 
were brand new, and answered all his dreams and 
questionings about the round ocean, and the little 
seeds, and the great blue sky. He knew that among 
the mountains of Japan there were many lovely 
shrines where religious people went to worship the 
spirits, supposed to live in the mountain crags; but 
no one had ever found the God-who-made-Heaven- 
and-Earth. From the minute Neesima read the 
wonderful words, he decided that he would find Him ! 

He thought that he might better live in America, 
since it was an American who wrote the primer, and 
he began asking questions; how far it was to America 




KOREAN STEPS 

They walked over a hundred 
miles to school, uphill and 
down-dale, along rocky roads 
edged with lovely violets. 

Their fathers and brothers 
were put in prison for daring 
to read the Bible and to preach 
Christianity. 

They know chapters and chap- 
ters of the Korean New Testa- 
ment by heart, so that if every 
Bible in all Korea were lost, 
they could write almost all of 
it from memory. 

They have decided what they 
want to become when school 
is over: — teachers! Teachers 
exactly like our nice American 
missionary. 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 61 

and how you got there ! But Japan was still a closed 
realm, as I told you before, and the Emperor would 
have any Japanese, who tried to leave it, killed. 
But Neesima was so hungry to find the God-who- 
made-Heaven-and-Earth that he was ready to risk 
even his life; after the custom of his people, he wrote 
down the prayer which was in his heart: "O Thou 
unknown God, if Thou hast eyes, look upon me; if 
Thou hast ears, hear me, and lead me to Thyself." 

Think of it! His first prayer to our God, who does 
see and hear, and who did answer his prayer; for, in 
1864, he persuaded a sea captain to help him escape 
to China. From China he worked his passage to 
Boston, where he had a very hard time for ten weeks. 
Then the owner of the vessel, Honorable Alpheus 
Hardy, heard of his adventures and sent for him, and 
because he was a man who loved God, he could an- 
swer Neesima's questions, giving him the Book of 
God, which began just like Neesima's primer: "In 
the beginning — God." Mr. Hardy was so interested 
in the pluck of this boy who simply had to find God, 
that he adopted him as his own son, and paid his tui- 
tion at Amherst College and at Andover Theological 
Seminary. 

You can imagine how Neesima's heart burned to go 
back home and stop all Japanese families from kneel- 
ing and bumping their polite foreheads before rows 
of prim wooden idols. And from chewing up silly 
little paper prayers into spitballs to throw at the 
idols; — if the wad of paper stuck to the idol, they 
thought the prayer would be answered. The day 
before Neesima sailed back to Japan there was a big 
good-bye meeting; — he stood on the platform pour- 



62 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

ing out his heart to the crowds of Americans who were 
so interested in him: "Upon this platform I stand 
until you give me the money to erect a college in 
which I may teach my poor fellow-countrymen of 
God, — the God of Love, the Living God, for whom 
their souls are crying out!" 

The big room was so quiet that you could have 
heard a pin drop! Then, while Neesima still waited, 
a man arose and promised $1,000, others began giv- 
ing, too; so Neesima went back to Japan, which had 
been opened to foreigners by this time, and started 
the famous Christian University at Kyoto, called 
the "Doshisha." 

See what queer things God used as Lamp-Lighters 
in Japan: Three-Men-in-a-Tub, a Book fished out of 
the water, and a geography primer! There were 
other quiet little happenings all over Japan, too, but 
I can only take time to tell you about "Shot-from-a- 
Train" and the "Pleasant Pirate." 

You must picture a Japanese train running merrily 
along its two steel rails in the pretty province of 
Shizuoka. A Japanese soldier in the train had a 
little "Soldier's St. John" in his kit, which he did 
not want, arid he tossed it out of the train window. 
Nobody knows to this day whether he aimed it into 
the open window of that little thatched house in the 
village of Suzukawa, or whether it just happened to 
land inside on the neat matting floor! 

Needless to say, there was a delightful commotion 
in the polite little family. When "father" came 
home from work, they lighted a big red Japanese 
lantern and they all sat on the floor around him while 
he read the wonderful stories St. John tells: about 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 63 

the Wedding at Cana, about the Woman at the Well, 
about the Wonderful Doctor who Healed the Sick, 
about the Good Shepherd, and the Heavenly Man- 
sions with Room for Everybody!! It was past be- 
lief — all this good news! But they couldn't help 
believing it; even the little children who looked like 
frolicsome butterflies in their floppy kimonos; they 
believed it, too. And you may be sure that other 
families in that little village of Suzukawa noticed 
the difference in their Christian neighbors and asked 
questions galore until, they, too, knew the beautiful 
stories and took the Lord Jesus into their hearts. 
Thus what a soldier shot from the train became a 
Lamp-Lighter to a whole village. 

And now for the Pirate Gentleman. 

He was not pleasant at first, of course. He gam- 
bled and stole and lied and drank and liked to fight! 
Captain Bickel used to say of him that "his crooked 
eyes looked straight in the directions of the eight 
points of the compass all at once!" His name was 
Hirata San, and he was coxswain of the crew of the 
gospel ship "Fukuin Maru," which Captain Bickel 
sailed all up and down the Inland Sea, so that he 
could go from island to island telling lonely villages 
about God. Hirata San had heard all these stories 
many times, of course — then suddenly he began be- 
lieving them himself. But the provoking part of 
it was that nobody could believe that he believed! 
"What? that fellow a Christian?" they laughed. 
Even Captain Bickel could not believe it. But 
Hirata San knew. He knew how different he felt 
inside, and how, instead of wanting to gamble and 
steal and quarrel, he now liked best of all to spend his 



64 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

spare moments spelling out the Bible verses. His 
speech grew gentle, his roughness disappeared, and 
gradually people saw the change, as if fairies had 
waved a wand over him changing him into someone 
lovely. But the fairy was only a plain little black 
Book, — the kind the Captain gave to everybody in 
the four hundred towns on the ship's visiting list. 
To the people in those towns Hirata San became a 
Lamp-Lighter, for they could read in him, as if he 
were a Living Bible, the kind of change God makes 
in even the worst of men. 

Colporteurs and Bible women and missionaries 
are giving copies of the Bible to crowds of Japanese 
folk this very minute — to people idly wandering up 
and down city streets, to jingling pilgrims climbing 
Fujiyama to worship the spirit of the mountain god 
and gain peace. Up they climb wearing queer 
round bamboo hats, in white kimonos with a picture 
of Fujiyama stamped on the back, and a belt of 
tinkling bells around their waists. At the summit 
will be someone with Bibles; they politely accept 
their copies, tuck them into their big sleeves, and 
nobody ever knows just what happens afterwards, of 
course. But if God can use floating Bibles and Prim- 
ers and Pirates and Books shot from a train, then I 
am sure He is still blessing these little Lamp-Lighters 
who are silently being missionaries for Him today! 

Japan has been a sort of disagreeable step-mother 
to a little country called Korea; on the map you can 
see how it dangles enticingly between Japan and 
China exactly like a bone between two hungry dogs. 
No wonder both Japan and China wanted it! 

For hundreds of years Korea was just as much of 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 65 

a Hermit nation as Japan, hostile to all foreigners. 
Under the great bell in the city of Seoul was a stone 
on which were carved words ordering Koreans to 
kill all intruding foreigners, and Christians v/ere 
promptly clapped into prison and tortured! To 
distribute Christian books meant losing one's head 
so I think you will see how mighty a victory the Bible 
has had when I tell you about Korea today. 

For the Christians there are different from Chris- 
tians in any other land ! Before they join the church 
they believe that they should tell their good news to 
their neighbors and friends, which has made Chris- 
tianity spread so rapidly that they say there's one 
new Korean convert every minute! Every Christian 
carries his Bible with him all the time, so that he can 
learn it by heart and have it handy to read to his 
friends. It would never do to have to run home and 
fetch it! Besides, he loves the little black Book, and 
Korean tailors were finally obliged to put an unheard- 
of thing into men's clothes, a pocket. "Bible pock- 
ets" they are called, because only Christians need 
them. 

I wish I could show you a Korean gentleman in 
his glistening white clothes and his funny little horse- 
hair hat that sets up on top of his head in such an airy 
way! It would blow away, only he ties it under his 
chin very primly. He is very dignified and solemn, 
and you wonder how he can be quite so white until 
you learn about Mrs. Yabu (which really means 
"Look Here," the only name Korean wives seem to 
have). Every morning she lugs yesterday's suits 
down to the river bank, where she kneels and splashes 
away at a great rate. Then she brings everything 



66 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

home and paddles the suits with a sort of baseball 
bat, her only iron! And lo! and behold, her shiny 
white husband can again sally forth clean and fresh. 

Christianity has done the nicest thing for all the 
poor little Look Here ladies — it has given them decent 
names, for one thing; and it has taught them how to 
read, and shown their husbands that a "Look Here" 
is quite as good as a man in the sight of the Lord 
Jesus, who spent so many hours talking kindly to 
women: Mary and Martha, you know, and the 
woman at the well, and Jairus' little daughter, and 
many others. Their fear of evil spirits is gone, too — 
indeed, Korean Christians seem to be the happiest 
and best in the whole, wide world. 

Curiously enough, they had an alphabet all ready for 
the Bible; they never used it much themselves be- 
cause Korean scholars thought it was too simple, — 
even an ignorant old woman could learn it in a few 
weeks. Scholars preferred the difficult Chinese pic- 
ture-writing, and called their own the "TJn-mun" or 
"dirty language." But you and I know how God must 
have been loving that "dirty language" for over four 
hundred years, — He saw just what was going to 
happen when His Korean Lamp-Lighters came along 
and found this homely everyday speech ready to 
use, so that everybody could read for themselves the 
beautiful life of the Lord Jesus. 

Everybody did read it, too, which is one reason why 
there is such a passion for the Bible all over Korea. 
People drop their tools and their farm utensils and 
their pots and kettles and flock to Bible schools, to 
spend months at a time learning anew exactly what 
the Good Book says. They have stopped calling 



Lamp-Lighters Aeross the Sea 67 

that language Un-mun (dirty) ; it is now Kuk-mun or 
national script, all on account of Bible popularity, 
for if you say "Show your Bibles!" out they fly from 
Bible pockets. 

Of course, everybody has not heard the Good 
News yet. All over Korea you can see tall painted 
devil-posts with gaudy grinning heads outside the 
villages to scare away evil spirits. The dreadful 
old "mutang" (witch) is often summoned to bring 
her drum and her cymbals to conjure away sprites 
that have ducked inside the well or made the baby 
sick. On' New Year's eve heathen Koreans still 
make a straw man and throw him outdoors with a 
piece of money inside, for a beggar is sure to steal the 
straw dummy and this is a fine way to lose last year's 
sins and start anew! Or maybe some dark night you 
may find a man in his courtyard flying a kite, on 
which he has written his sins: bad temper, laziness, 
and the rest. When the kite is away up in the clouds, 
he cuts the string, and goes indoors to bed, hoping 
he has lost those sins forever! He is never quite 
sure, of course — and so he tries new ways. 

But with every Christian busy telling his neigh- 
bors about the Lord Jesus, who alone can forgive 
sins, and with a Bible in every Christian man's 
pocket or tucked in every Christian woman's belt, 
it really seems as if Korea is a land so full of Lamp- 
Lighters that it will not be long now before "the 
entrance of Thy Word will give light unto the 
simple." 



CHAPTER V. 

'Answering the Giant Question Mark' 

" The people that sit in darkness 
have seen a great light" 




You will love the true story of^the little Persian"girl whose father had 
been killed by rabid Mohammedans for daring to ride on his donkey 
carrying Persian Bibles into Moslem villages where .no missionary had 
ever had time to go. "But now," they gloated wickedly, "now, by this 
man's death, we have stopped the Christian religion from spreading." 

But the ~ colporteur's young daughter secretly stuffed a bag full of 
little Persian Bibles and grain for the donkey; then she slung the bag 
across the donkey's back, perched herself up on top of it and cantered 
off to the hot little Christ-less villages. 

"They may kill my father's body," she whispered to the yellow desert 
sands, "but they cannot kill the Bibles of my father's God!" 



CHAPTER V. 

"Answering the Giant Question Mark" 

The blackest little girl you ever saw skipped out 
from her little round house, — a little hut like a bee- 
hive, with its roof thatched with palm leaves from 
which the rain could drip — drip — drip! Just as 
she capered down the path to the peanut patch, a 
saucy little bird up in a palm tree cocked his head on 
one side and chirped at her in the most inquisitive 
fashion, just as if he were asking: "Now where in 
the world are you going, you very black little black 
girl?" 

Personally I love to have tiny birds friendly with 
me in that way — as if they had picked me out from 
everybody else in town as the safest person to chatter 
to! 

But she! Oh, but that little black girl was scared: 
she rolled her very black eyes until only the whites 
showed, and she shuddered all the way down to her 
ten black toes, — which is really quite hard to do when 
you live in Africa on top of the Equator! She dashed 
back into the beehive hut, and presently came out 
again all dressed up in the funniest-looking neck- 
laces! One was of plaited grass with a chicken bone 
dangling at the end; the other was a string with a 
lion's tooth tied on it; she had a hair bracelet with 
some feathers in it. Her mother got these things 
from the witch doctor for her, because you must 
know that black mothers believe that chirping birds 
are trying to cast evil spirits into people; palm leaves 



70 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

that rustle in the breeze are full of evil spirits, too; 
so are motes that dance in the sunbeams or moon- 
light that flickers in the well. The wise (?) village 
witch-doctor is kept busy making little "charms" 
(fetishes, they are called) to keep people safe. Yet 
you never can tell; it's all very risky, for perhaps the 
evil spirits won't like the charms, after all. And so 
the black people are always scared and uncertain. 

When I open my geography at the map of Africa, 
I am always surprised all over again to see that it 
looks exactly like a great big question mark. Per- 
haps you can guess now what Africa's question really 
is, "Oh, how, how can we be safe from evil spirits???" 
And when I squint a little closer at the map, I can see 
just as plain as day that Africa looks exactly like 
some giant ear, too — listening — listening — waiting — 
waiting — for the answer to its own question mark! 

It is going to mean a lot to the little black girl and 
her family when Mr. Robert Moffat comes to town ! 
Yet long before he even got to Africa, sneering people 
on the boat from England said: "Just you wait till 
Chief Africaner gets you! He'll set you up for a 
target for his boys to shoot at, and he'll make a 
drum of your skin, and a drinking cup of your skull." 

But Lamp-Lighters have to be brave, and luckily 
this very savage chief was very cordial to Mr. Mof- 
fat, welcoming him to his Kraal. Such a commotion ! 
For he ordered some of his wives to build a beehive 
hut for the White Stranger; in half an hour it was 
made, and Mr. Moffat moved in. So did all the 
curious village dogs, and the curious village children, 
and a chicken or two to peck in the dust, and a crowd 
of grannies and grandpas ! It must have been rather 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 71 

unpleasant for Mr. Moffat, but long before he has 
known that it would often be uncomfortable to be 
an African Lamp-Lighter; he overlooked the curious 
crowd and started right in to learn the language, do 
that he could translate the Bible at once. He had 
the hardest time to find the right words, however, for 
he dared not use many of their expressions for sacred 
things, since they were too full of their own old ideas 
about idols and fear of evil spirits. Then, too, they 
lived on plantains and peanuts; what did they under- 
stand about "sowing and reaping" or "vineyards" 
or "cornfields," or half the other things the Bible 
mentions? Also they had the most roundabout way 
of counting; — imagine saying "eight" like this: 
"Goshume go choa go hera menuana me beri," which 
means: "Ten except the hindering (or held down) 
two fingers." He had to invent his own words for 
numbers. 

Even when his Bible was done, it was years and 
years before any of those ignorant, scared black folk 
accepted the new religion, — just as it had been with 
Carey and Judson and Morrison, too, you remember? 
Mr. Moffat lived a very lonely life, journeying around 
among the different villages. Once he walked right 
up to a lion, thinking it was part of a rock, and barely 
escaped with his life. Another time, looking up, he 
saw a tiger cat ready to spring at him. Stepping 
hastily back, he trod on a cobra, which instantly 
wrapped itself round him tightly! He had presence 
of mind to raise his gun, and just as the venomous 
reptile was about to strike its fangs into him he shot it 
over his shoulder, and it fell dead. You can plainly 
see that it needed a cool head, a quick eye and hand, 



72 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

and a very bold heart to be a pioneer missionary in 
those savage parts. 

Once when Robert Moffat went back to England, 
he said in an address: "Z have often stood at sunset 
time on a certain hill near my home and seen the smoke 
of a thousand villages where no missionary of Christ 
has ever been." As he said those words, a young man 
in the audience began picturing himself visiting those 
thousand heathen villages, so full of scared black 
people wearing foolish "charms," and he said, "I'm 
going!" 

He did, too. His name was David Livingstone, a 
wonderful Lamp-Lighter, about whom I am sure you 
have heard many thrilling stories, for his brave motto 
was, "Anywhere — so it be forward" 

After the black people were taught to read, they 
learned parts of the Bible by heart, as they dug in 
their tiny gardens or fished in their hollowed-out 
tree-trunk canoes. Their lives grew gentler and their 
fears grew less. It seems to me as if the Bible were 
written especially for scared black people! Psalm 
cxxi, for instance: "The sun shall not smite thee by 
day, nor the moon by night .... The Lord shall pre- 
serve thy going out and thy coming in from this time 
forth, even for evermore " 

The savages who could not read watched their 
black Christian neighbors with surprise, and when 
they saw nicer homes (very clean!) and really-truly 
clothes, they shook their poor puzzled heads, saying, 
"It is strange medicine on those leaves !" They even 
liked to smell the Book, and thought the leather bind- 
ing in damp weather was simply delightful! Some 
of them were afraid to open the covers of the Bible for 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 73 

fear some of the "magic medicine" might blow off the 
leaves. Mr. Moffat's favorite story was about meet- 
ing an elderly chief who looked very downcast. 

"I said to my friend, 'What is the matter? Who is 
dead?' 'Oh,' he said, 'no one is dead, but my dog 
has eaten a leaf of the Bible.' 'Well,' I said, 'per- 
haps I can replace it for you.' 'It isn't that so much,' 
said the man sadly, 'but my dog will never be any 
good — he will never bite anybody now, he will never 
catch any jackals, he will be as tame as I see the peo- 
ple become who believe in that Book. All our war- 
riors become gentle as women, so alas! my dog is 
done for!' i This just shows you what a black savage 
had seen Mr. Moffat's Bible do to other black savages. 

Perhaps you already know that there are six hun- 
dred languages and dialects spoken in Africa, so that 
other Lamp-Lighters besides Mr. Moffat had to learn 
these other languages, in order that every tribe might 
have its own Bible. The Hottentot language was a 
very hard one to learn, for it is "four queer smack- 
ing sounds"; — you can imagine how hard it was to 
reduce clicks, grunte, squeaks and hiccoughs to writing ! 
Among the savages who filed their teeth, like the 
Okamba tribe of East Africa, their Lamp-Lighter 
found that pronunciation differed according to the 
fashion of the dentist! Another Lamp-Lighter on 
the Nile delta had to teach the black people a name 
for maiden and sister, since women and girls were so 
unimportant that they were only called "things," 
and were bought or sold for so many brass rods or so 
many beads. There were difficulties down on the 
Gold Coast, too, but every difficulty paid. For when 
Matthew and John had been translated into the 



74 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

"Ga" language, for instance, the little negro scholars 
studied in school all the morning; then they scam- 
pered down to the seashore and wrote the Ga alpha- 
bet in the sand, to teach their mothers and fathers 
who could not read. I have heard of one missionary 
who had only one Bible, but half his pupils learned 
to read it right side up, and the other half learned it 
upside down! Why not, if you begin that way? 
I think it was Dr. Pilkington who had this experience; 
he did valiant work as Lamp-Lighter. So did Mr. 
Alexander Mackay, whom people call "The White 
Man of Uganda." He was not only a Lamp-Lighter, 
translating the Bible into the Uganda speech at night, 
but he filled his days with doctoring the sick, teaching 
black boys to weave and build and print. He lived 
in a time of terror, for King Mwanga hated Chris- 
tians so bitterly that he killed them right and left, 
burned their homes and banished the missionaries, 
keeping Mr. Mackay as a hostage. Another brave 
Lamp-Lighter, Bishop Hannington, was cruelly 
killed by this king. But nothing — nothing — could 
make the black people give up the wonderful new 
"Words" which brought them peace and safety and 

joy. 

Nothing could stop the Men-Who-Sell-Bibles, 
either; neither weather nor danger nor savage peo- 
ple. 

How would you like to be the colporteur who 
went to the town of Obomey, meaning "City of 
Skulls"? Inside its ramparts the hideous, grinning 
skulls of their human enemies were everywhere : over 
their doorways, on their standards and walking- 
sticks. The king's footstool was a skull, and from 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 75 

the girdles of the women hung little polished skulls 
for drinking cups. It seems to me that men brave 
enough to venture there, are living answers to the 
hymn we sing in church: 

"The Son of God goes forth to war, 
A kingly crown to gain: 
His blood-red banner streams afar; 
Who follows in His train?" 

I think they do, don't you? Those Men-Who- 
Sell-Books? And yet, they are only following in the 
footprints of the Lamp-Lighters who bravely went 
first to learn the language and get the Book ready. 

One of my pet stories is about a Lamp-Lighter on 
the Congo River, — named Mr. Henry Richards. 
For ten years he had been teaching his wicked people 
the Ten Commandments, and they nodded their 
black heads agreeing that it was all very wise, and, 
yes, indeed, they believed it; but — they kept on 
being just as bad as ever! 

Then it dawned on Mr. Richards that "don't"s 
were the cold part of the Bible, and he would try the 
"love 9 ' parts on them, those warm stories about 
Jesus. Every day he translated a few verses from 
Luke's gospel, and the people listened eagerly. This 
was all very well until he came to the sixth chapter 
and the thirtieth verse: "Give to every man that 
asheth of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods 
ask them not again.' 9 

Poor Mr. Richards! He did not see how he dared 
to translate those words, for the black people kept 
stealing his things all the time; they were so envious 
of anyone who owned strange umbrellas that shut 
up like a stick when it was dry, and opened up like 



76 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

a palm tree when it rained! For themselves, they 
just tore off huge banana leaves to balance on their 
woolly heads, — but a real umbrella? Such style! 
Of course they wanted it. And his amusing tick- 
tock clock that told you the time of day even when 
clouds hid the sun, they wanted that, too. They 
wanted other things, also, and Mr. Richards felt 
that God would understand why he skipped trans- 
lating that verse, — for surely a missionary needed 
proper equipment. 

But you know how it is: there's a funny little 
Something-Inside-Us-that-Talks-Back-at-Us, we call 
it conscience, and it began to talk back at Mr. Rich- 
ards : had he any business to skip over any of God's 
words to men? Wasn't the Lord Jesus often very 
uncomfortable, too, when He was here among men? 

And so Mr. Richards finally translated the verse, 
and sure enough, when the service was over, the 
congregation had a perfectly lovely time, helping 
themselves to his things : — boots for their bare black 
feet, handkerchiefs for their flat black noses, collars 
and neckties for their black necks, spoons, canned 
goods, books, pillows, bed, chairs, tables — by night 
there was nothing left! 

And I suppose when Mr. Richards lay down on his 
hard floor, he must have felt blue, indeed; yet per- 
haps he remembered that when the Lord Jesus was 
here among men, He had no place to lay His head, 
either. 

But there's a surprise coming! For when his con- 
gregation got back to their thatched huts with their 
new treasures, and laid down on their floors to sleep, 
then the funny little Something-Inside-that-Talks- 




A smile is the same in any one of the two hundred Oceanic languages 
into which our Lamp-Lighters have already translated the Bible. And 
boys are boys the world over! The first two in the front row are young 
mischiefs, don't you think so? But the third boy seems to be rather 
seriously thinking how splendid it would be to be Mr. Missionary Photog- 
rapher, while the sad boy behind him looks hungry for something, — 
don't you imagine he is lonely for someone to love him hard? The next 
three boys in the back row are curious: "Now who are these Christian 
missionaries, anyhow?" they seem to ask, "these men who came in a boat 
with a 'manv-leaved creature' called the Book of God?" 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 77 

Back began to talk back at them, too! "Selfish per- 
son," it said to them, "how about that white man? 
Isn't he a long Way from the tribe of white men? 
Hasn't he come here just to teach you about the 
great God of Heaven? Doesn't he teach your chil- 
dren to read the magic medicine? Hasn't he always 
given you things? Yet here you are making him 
uncomfortable. He never said a word, but surely 
his heart was low within him, — nothing left!" 

One by one their consciences began to prick, and 
toward morning you could have seen them tip- 
toeing softly down the village street with the "spoils" 
they had stolen, and when Mr. Richards woke up, 
he found everything stacked up outside his door. 
Then he knew that "love" had melted the coldness of 
their heathen hearts. 

As he translated the rest of Luke to them, they 
wept as if their hearts would break when he read 
about the death of the Lord Jesus, but when they 
heard about that first Easter, it was as if Christ had 
risen in each of their hearts, so happy were they! 

His congregation grew so big that a Boston church 
sent out a chapel in sections, all ready to be pieced 
together. These new Christians toted the seven 
hundred pieces of that chapel from Banza Manteke 
sixty miles away. On their heads they carried them, 
each trip lasting a week, and they did it all for love 
of the Lord Jesus whose Book had taken fear out of 
their lives, and with deep gratitude to the Tribe-of- 
White - Men - from - over - the - Waters - Toward - the - 
Place- Where-the-Sun-goes-D own . 

They are still selling Bibles all over Africa. I wish 
I could show you the men on camels who cross burn- 



78 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

ing deserts, or other men trudging through dense 
jungles, getting torn by thorns and in constant dan- 
ger of lions, carrying Bibles to little grass villages 
among the lemon and cotton trees. Then up in 
northern Africa near the blue Mediterranean Sea, 
I wish I could show you the country of Morocco, 
as big as France, but quite different, for the wild 
people are always fighting. Among the most devoted 
of the Men-Who-Sell-Bibles was a Mr. Mackintosh. 
He must have thoroughly believed Christ's promise, 
"Lo, I am with you always," for he went everywhere- 
even into excitable mobs in large towns, and up 
among the savage tribes in the Atlas Mountains, 
where the little villages perch on the dizzy crags like 
so many eagle's nests, and the little children are 
tied to trees, to keep them from toppling off! Down 
by the sea he plodded through miles of scorching 
sand, with the blistering sun beating down causing 
fever. How he did sell Bibles, though! And the 
people paid for them with bundles of dried fish or 
eggs or milk. 

He had a young Syrian helper, named Aisa Farah, 
who used to watch the dense ring of excited faces 
around some snake charmer in the bazaar, and he 
said to himself, "Why not I, too?" He put on a 
Moorish jelab and took a Moorish musical instru- 
ment to twang on until he had drawn a crowd, then 
he told stories— stories of the Lord Jesus. The 
people listened eagerly, "We never heard before," 
they gasped; "What a man!" and others wanted to 
go and find Him at once! Aisa Farah used to give 
loaves of bread away on Sunday morning to about 
seventy beggars in Tangier, then he explained how 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 79 

Christ was the "Bread of Life." It was wonderful 
to the poor Moslems, who were driven from door to 
door of their own rich people with the pious words: 
"May Allah open!" or "Allah will give thee," mean- 
ing that they did not propose to open or to give ! 

Our Bible is creeping into white-walled cities with 
dazzling terraces which rise out of the blue sea, and 
into white Moorish houses full of Moslem women and 
children and slaves to whom a Mrs. Missionary, or 
her Bible woman, is telling stories of Jesus every 
week. 

Away over on the east, at the top of the Giant 
Question Mark, I wish I could show you Port Said, 
where the ships come through from India, China, and 
Japan. Sometimes a dream ship of the mirage seems 
to sail silently beside them along the shimmering 
yellow desert. The colporteurs at Port Said have 
Bibles in forty languages to give out to the sailors 
and passengers, and nobody knows how many brown 
and yellow and white travelers have read with sur- 
prise the wonderful words in the little Book. 

If we should jump from Port Said out of the Afri- 
can Question Mark across into Arabia, we would find 
that they were selling Bibles there, too; also in Tur- 
key, and up in Persia. A Hindu Lamp-Lighter, 
named Henry Martyn, made a Persian transla- 
tion when he was ill and taking a sea-trip. Later he 
presented a copy to the Shah of Persia! 

The Bible whispers comfort to the giant ear of 
Africa, and also to the big, oblong island which lies in 
the ocean beside Africa, looking as if it were really the 
dot which properly belongs underneath that great 
question mark ! The story of the Bible in Madagas- 
car is a most thrilling tale. 



80 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

First of all, there was a fairly good king named 
Radama I. who welcomed missionaries, who let 
Lamp-Lighters translate the Bible into the Mala- 
gasy language; then this king died and his wicked 
sister Ranavalona became queen. She hated Chris- 
tians and threatened to kill any Malagasy found 
reading a Bible. But the new Christians simply 
couldn't stop reading, and she kept on killing them or 
torturing them during twenty-five horrible years, 
until ten thousand of them were killed and others 
made to pay harsh penalties. Missionaries were 
driven out of the island, and Christians all over the 
world decided that the work of the Lamp-Lighters 
had been in vain; — Christianity would surely die 
out. For twenty-five years is a long time to be with- 
out instruction, with cruelty making it so easy to 
slip back into heathen ways. 

But when Ranavalona died, the missionaries 
hurried back, and found twelve priceless copies of 
the Bible left on the island, — copies all thumbed and 
patched and warped because they had been read 
and re-read and hidden in the earth for safe-keeping ! 
When new Bibles arrived, a copy was sent to the new 
queen, but she let it lie on a table in the palace, quite 
as if it didn't exist. 

But she died! And one day, her successor, Queen 
Ranavalona II. opened the strange Book, read it 
eagerly and believed every word of it! She threw 
away her idols, even banishing the big national 
idol, "Manja-Katsiroa," and the fetish which was 
supposed to heal people was hacked to bits and burn- 
ed. The frightened heathen watched in terror, but 
nothing happened as a punishment, and they, too, 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 81 

decided to accept Christianity, which now spread 
like wildfire from the palace to the quaint little clay 
huts, thatched with reeds. So out of darkness came 
a great light, for of all countries in the world it was 
the Bible, and the Bible alone, which for twenty-five 
years kept Christianity alive in Madagascar. "For 
heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall 
not pass away." 




CHAPTER VI. 



'Speaking their Language' 



"The earth shall be full of the knowl- 
edge of the Lord as the waters cover the 
sea." (isaiah xi, 9) 



CHAPTER VI, 



"Speaking their Language" 

The other day as I was glancing at the map of 
the world, I began looking harder than usual at those 
cunning little freckles that dot the face of the sea, 
and it dawned on me that each tiniest "freckle" was 
really a sort of storybook, brimful of the most hair- 
raising tales of adventure. For the "freckles" are 
really islands, as you know, of course; but although 
they have such cozy jolly names, like "Friendly," 
"Sandwich," "Christmas," and "Cook," yet it was 
anything but friendly or Christmassy for the first 
white people who went there. 

There are no more beautiful places in the world 
than the South Sea Island freckles that dot the Pacific 
Ocean. The green palms are so very green, and the 
blue sea is so very turquoise, and the yellow sands 
are so very gleaming, and the white waves that boom 
ceaselessly on the shore are so very white and foamy, 
as if they had been scrubbed up into Ivory soap suds! 
Big noisy red and blue parrots squawk at each 
other from the treetops, and gorgeous yellow and 
purple flowers rear themselves up like haughty kings 
and queens. It would seem as if it were a perfect 
place to live, for right at your front door are bread- 
fruit trees to feed you, and cocoanut trees to give 
you milk (it tastes like lemonade, however!) — better 
even than having a grocery-store-around-the-corner, 
for all you have to do is to run outdoors and pluck 
your supper off the trees! 



84 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

You might expect that people who lived in such 
a perfect place would be just as nice as nice could be! 
But it is quite the other way around — they are al- 
most too dreadful to describe: to begin with, they 
wear no clothes, only strings of teeth or shells for 
bracelets and necklaces, and they have queer pat- 
terns tattooed all over their brown bodies, and their 
kinky heads are generally decorated with tortoise 
shell and fish tails! No brave warrior would think 
of dancing at a feast without some human skull 
dangling from his belt, which shows you a little of 
their cruelty and their indecency. 

Dusky brown children grew up to be murderers 
and their mothers were proud of everything they did 
that was cruel and barbarous. For you must know 
that if drought withered the fruit trees, everyone 
thought some hostile village had "held up" the rain, 
and their spell must be broken by stone club and 
spear; if sickness came, it was surely due to the sor- 
cery of an unfriendly tribe, and every death must be 
avenged in blood. And when a man died, they often 
strangled his wife, or cut off her fingers, anyhow. 

There was no harder place for Lamp-Lighters to 
go, for they carried their lives in their hands, well 
aware that even if they landed in safety, they might 
be butchered as the cause of the first outbreak of 
sickness, hurricane, or earthquake! There was but 
one mail a year, and no medical help within hundreds 
(sometimes thousands) of miles across the sea; there 
was no butter or milk or vegetables; sometimes not 
even fish or fowl; always cocoanuts! 

It was a Lamp-Lighter named Geddie who landed 
on one of those lovely, green islands and found on the 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 85 

yellow beach a great fire and a huge cauldron in 
which almost eighty enemies had been cooked; scat- 
tered all over the sands he found the bones of these 
poor people whom the cannibals had eaten. He 
could tell by the footprints that there had been wild 
dancing around and around that giant pot, and I 
should think even his brave heart might have wished 
"O, to be safe back in England!" 

The cannibals had evidently gone home to their 
leaf-thatched huts, exhausted with the feasting, 
so Mr. Missionary dug a huge grave and reverently 
buried all those sad, ghastly bones. This was a 
strange beginning, you must admit! 

He stuck it out, too! And so did brave Mrs. 
Geddie, teaching those astonished people Christian 
ways; and one Easter Sunday morning there were 
eight hundred islanders in church, each decently 
dressed in a calico frock Mrs. Geddie herself had 
cut and prepared. The inscription on Mr. Geddie's 
grave tells volumes about this plucky family: — 
"When he came to the island in 1848 there was not 
a single Christian, when he left it in 1872 there was 
not a single heathen." Twenty-four years packed 
full of work in which the Bible was translated by 
himself, and another Lamp-Lighter, Mr. Inglis. 
When they could explain to the savages that the 
"many-leaved creature of white paper covered with 
tattoo marks" was a special message from God to 
their island, the people reverently bowed down to 
it, and eagerly bought copies for themselves, giving 
porpoise teeth and tropical shells in exchange. 

Little children flocked to school and afterwards 
you could see them scratching letters on cocoanut 



86 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

fronds to show off their learning to ignorant grown- 
ups; there was one tribe where it was stylish grotesque- 
ly to clip and "tonsure" the dusky heads of school 
boys with any word they might choose. One very 
brown little fellow had "Carpenter's son" done on 
his head, because that was what Jesus was and what 
he himself was learning to be in school! 

Speaking of carpenters, you have no idea how much 
a Lamp-Lighter in those South Sea Islands needs to 
know how to be a little bit of everything: a doctor 
as well as a translator, school teacher, builder, print- 
er, and so on. One tribe spoke of their missionary as 
"Matai ni mate" (the carpenter of sickness), because 
he knew how to mend sick bodies! There was al- 
ways a brisk demand for the "Eyes of Glass" which 
helped the dim eyes of aged converts to read the dear 
words in their precious Bibles. 

Next let me tell you about a very famous Lamp- 
Lighter named John G. Paton, who was sent out to 
the island of Tanna. He could not stay there long, 
however, as the savages were far too unfriendly, 
so he went to settle on Aniwa. 

When he landed, he at once selected the best site 
for his new home, but the islanders were most un- 
willing for him to live anywhere but on one place near 
the seashore. Years later, when Chief Namakei 
became a Christian, he explained why they acted in 
that way! "When Missi came," he said, "we saw 
his big boxes ! We knew he had blankets and calico, 
axes and knives, fishhooks and all such things, and 
so we said : 'Don't drive him away, else we will lose 
all these nice things. We will let him land. But we 
will force him to live on the Sacred Plot. Then our 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 87 

gods will surely kill him in anger, and we will divide 
all he has among the men of Aniwa!' But Missi 
built his house on our most sacred spot. He and his 
family lived there, and the gods did not strike them 
dead. He planted bananas there, and we said: 
'Now when they eat the bananas they will all drop 
dead, as our fathers said would happen to anyone 
eating fruit from that sacred ground.' But Missi 
ate them and he did not die. So what we say and 
what our fathers have said is not true. Our gods 
cannot kill them. Their Jehovah God is stronger 
than the gods of Aniwa." 

The brown people had only leaf huts, and they were 
very curious while Mr. Paton was building his house, 
of course. One day he wanted some nails, so he 
took a smooth chip of wood and wrote on it exactly 
what he wanted and gave it to the old Chief Namakei 
to carry to Mrs. Paton. 

"But what do you want?" Namakei asked. 

"The chip will tell her," Mr. Paton said. You 
should have seen how angry the old chief became, 
thinking Missi was making fun of him, "Who ever 
heard of a chip of wood speaking!" he snorted, mad 
straight through, for there had never been a written 
language on any of these islands (until our mission- 
aries made one !) . 

But Mrs. Paton glanced at that silly chip, got the 
nails, and sent them back to her husband in the most 
unconcerned way. 

This was Mr. Paton's chance to teach Namakei 
that God speaks to man by the tattoo-marks on the 
leaves of his Book, exactly as he had spoken to Mrs. 
Paton on the chip. Namakei was immensely im- 



88 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

pressed, and ever so eager to see this unknown Word 
of God printed in his own language. He helped Mr. 
Paton learn words and master ideas, and when the 
Bibles were actually printed he found the talking 
page no less wonderful than the talking chip. 

"It talks straight from God to my heart!" an old 
woman said delightedly; only she was afraid to leave 
her Bible open for fear some of those precious tattoo 
marks would fall off the page ! 

By and by, when Mr. Paton dug a well and could 
actually get showers of rain from beneath the earth 
at any time when he wanted water, instead of waiting 
for the clouds to drop it down to him occasionally, 
then everybody on the island decided that they would 
burn their idols, for certainly Jehovah God was God, 
if he could send rain up from the earth! So Aniwa 
burned its idols ! 

But life was not easy on the other islands among 
those naked painted savages. Many and many a 
mission house was burned, and many a missionary 
was murdered. Yet new white teachers took their 
places, and the dusky cannibals grunted to each 
other: "How is this? We killed them, or drove 
them away. We plundered their houses and robbed 
them. If any tribe had treated us in that way, 
nothing could ever make us return to that place. But 
these white people come back; — is it to trade or to 
make money ? No, no ! Only to give us a little book 
with tattoo-marks straight from their God to our 
island. If their God makes them brave to do all 
that, we may well worship Him, too." 

In this way island after island after island was 
opened up to Mr. Paton, and even savage chiefs 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 89 

pledged themselves to protect and cherish him long 
before they knew anything whatever of the Gospel, 
except the amazing tales that came from Christian 
islands. When he visited these Christian islands, 
you would have laughed to see how the natives 
greeted him! They waded out into the waves, un- 
able to wait until he landed; they gave him a noisy 
welcome, rubbing their noses on his in native style, 
chuckling: "Twice twenty moons have passed away 
since you left us, Missi. You fill our eyes! You 
fill our eyes! Have you brought us God's Book, 
Missi? See, we have stacked up jars of cocoanut oil 
to pay for them!" 

On one island, called Tahiti, the warriors' spears 
were made into rails for the pulpit stairs, and King 
Pomare himself translated parts of the Bible into 
Tahitian. The mission printing house was built 
with stones that once had served for human sacrifice; 
and the war drums were now beaten on Sunday 
mornings to call the happy decently dressed natives 
to church! 

You will admire another brave Lamp-Lighter 
named John Williams. He was not willing to sit 
down at ease on one island, contentedly teaching a 
village of several hundred happy Christians, knowing 
all the time that there were thousands of cannibals all 
around, eating one another's flesh and drinking one 
another's blood with a savage delight, living and 
dying without hearing of the Lord Jesus. 

He was so anxious to carry Bibles to these other 
islands that he built himself a ship, all alone. You 
boys will see how plucky he was, when you read that 
he knew next to nothing about ship-building and had 



90 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

nothing on hand to build with! He made the queer- 
est tools. He made a forge, but it would not work; 
he tried again, but this time hungry rats nibbled his 
bellows, because they were made of goat's skin, 
which is a lovely titbit for any rat! Then Mr. 
Williams made wooden bellows, which it needed 
eight men to blow! As he had no saw, trees had to 
be hacked down with a hatchet, split into halves with 
a wedge, and chipped into planks with an adze. For 
a curved plank he had to find a crooked tree! He 
used wooden pegs for nails, native mats for sails and 
made ropes from cocoanut fibre. It was slow work, 
but, when the little boat was launched, she was sixty 
feet long and he called her the "Messenger of Peace." 

John Williams sailed thousands of miles in her, 
from Raratonga, already made Christian, to the 
Samoan or Navigator Island, eighteen hundred miles 
away. They were dangerous voyages, for, as his 
boat came skimming over the blue water, the savages 
rushed jostling out into the waves to meet him, wav- 
ing spears and clubs. As he waded ashore he could 
hear them sucking their breath with delight, saying : 
"I'll have his hat!" "I'll have his jacket!" "I'll 
have his shirt," as if they were quite sure the chief 
would kill him at once. 

Mr. Williams would say to his companion: "See, 
there are boys playing on the beach. That is a good 
sign." But the other man would answer: "Yes, but 
there are no women! Savages mean mischief when 
they send their women away." 

The painted chief would generally say: "Tell us, 
O man, why you persist in coming!" And John 
Williams would fearlessly answer: "I am come to 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 91 

tell you of the true God, so that you may burn your 
gods of wood, and of bird's feathers and of cloth." 

Roars of anger would come from the priests, whose 
faces were blackened with charcoal and whose bodies 
were hideously painted with red and yellow stripes. 
Anger burst from the fierce warriors, too, who stood 
nearby, with great waving headdresses of bird's feath- 
ers and white shells: "Burn our gods! Then what 
gods would we have left?" 

"You are foolish," John Williams would say, "you 
take a log of wood and carve it, you call it god, and 
kneel to offer it food. And you take another log of 
wood and carve it, but you call it a canoe, and sail the 
seas in it. Yet there is no difference at all between 
your god and your canoe ! You would not dare burn 
your god, yet you burn the wood shavings to cook 
your meals. Let me tell you of the God of Heaven." 

On the beach he would lift up his voice above the 
boom of the giant breakers and tell the story of the 
Lord Jesus. And the savages would listen! Oh, 
how hungrily they listened! It seems now as if the 
Lord Jesus Himself must have stood beside John 
Williams and guarded him. When he finally learned 
their language, he would translate the Bible into 
their own speech, and they eagerly brought arrow- 
root and rough little mats in exchange for it. At 
night by dim lantern light you could hear some 
reader chanting the Gospels to a crowd of spell- 
bound listeners. 

Later on, English people gave Mr. Williams a 
splendid steamboat called "The Camden," but on his 
very first trip with three thousand copies of the New 
Testament this good man was cruelly murdered by 



92 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

the cannibals of heathen Erromanga. But at once 
there were other brave Lamp-Lighters willing to take 
his place, and I like to know that the children of 
England raised money to buy a new mission ship 
which they named after him "The John Williams!" 
For over twenty years she flitted over those lovely 
turquoise seas, bearing at her prow the half-length 
carved figure of John Williams, with the open Bible 
in his hand ! Dauntless missionaries sailed from coral 
island to coral island, to the curious sea-villages raised 
up on piles over the ocean; and they plodded way 
inland, too, to the thatched houses that stood upon 
platforms or swung in the treetops one hundred feet 
high. 

Little by little, wonderful things happened. Once 
on Tongareva the cocoanut crop failed and the 
savages were starving. When the "John Williams" 
stopped at Aitutaki, twenty-four thousand cocoanuts 
were loaded on board as an offering from the natives 
to their suffering "friends" — yet for generations 
they had all been bitter foes; whoever was victor 
crowned his triumph by destroying the fruit trees 
of the vanquished; but now the dusky tribes had 
learned to see Christ in the stranger, to give Him 
meat in feeding the hungry, to clothe Himiin clothing 
the naked. Do you wonder the savages shook their 
puzzled heads at such gentle treatment, and listened 
curiously to the strange words in the "Book of the 
Black Tattoo-Marks"? 

There were other brave Lamp-Lighters in those 
South Seas about whom you would enjoy reading — 
John Coleridge Patteson, and James Chalmers, and 
James Calvert, the printer-missionary, who lost all 



Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 93 

his type in a shipwreck and patiently made some more 
out of old tin cans so that he could print Bibles with- 
out any delay! 

Some of the islands were very hostile, while some 
seemed just waiting for the Lord Jesus. On Ambryn 
their very language seemed waiting for the Lamp- 
Lighters to use, it was so kind and hopeful a speech, 
for when you said "goodbye" the words were: "Fire 
again in the sky to you" (another sunny day), and 
"love" was the "Keeps-calling of the heart"! Even 
their old chiefs who clung to their gigantic color- 
splashed "makis" (images cut out of inverted fern 
trunks) and refused to be baptized, began to pray at 
sunset time to the great Christian God to take care 
of them as if they knew the words of the Psalm: 
"Men shall worship Him, every one from his own 
place, even all the isles of the heathen." 

Lamp-Lighters have already translated the Bible 
into over two hundred of these oceanic tongues; but 
when you look at your map you must remember that 
there is "freckle" after "freckle" where no mission 
boat has ever stopped, where no precious Book has 
ever been covered with the particular kind of black 
tattoo-mark that speaks their language! 

Thousands upon thousands of dusky people are 
waiting. . . .waiting. . . .waiting. And while they wait 
they wonder many things, and try many things; 
they wear many queer little ornaments to protect 
themselves and give many strange offerings to wood- 
en idols, hoping to be happy in this life and in the one 
that is to come. Day after day our modern Lamp- 
Lighters are sailing nearer and nearer to the Christ- 
less islands; night after night they sit under some leaf- 



94 Lamp-Lighters Across the Sea 

thatched roof, telling the dear story of the Lord Jesus 
to brown people across the sea, until the day shall 
come "when the earth shall be full of the knowledge 
of God as the waters cover the sea." 

And I know of no lovelier way for you and me to 
share in their work, than for us to paint a little pic- 
ture of some far-away palmy island in our mind's 
eye each evening as we kneel to pray, so that as we 
imagine the booming surf and the turquoise sea and 
the naked brown savages we can pray very longingly : 

"God bless every Lamp- 
Lighter tonight/ ' 




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